Audience growth for Deserts
How to grow and scale your audience for Deserts
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FINDING AN AUDIENCE
Deserts are very good at finding groups of people who are already gathering and already looking for something specific. This type is best suited to join other communities or read other books' reviews and see what readers are asking for.
They do well and find their audience quickly when they can tap into another's audience first. This audience may exist on retailers, or it may be a friend that they've networked with that could do cross promotion with them. Many Deserts get their start as service providers to successful authors in the genre that they want to write in. This provides a ready-made audience or “market” that the author can then “write-to-market” to.
In many ways, Deserts do not find their audience. They instead find an underserved audience that they think they can create a good product for. Sometimes they and their friends are the underserved audience—though they will usually verify that there are appropriate retailer categories that they can find more like them under. Once they find the audience, they will then attempt to gain a foothold and will continue to sell that product for as long as it is easily profitable.
NURTURING AN AUDIENCE
Deserts are unique in that they usually don’t want to talk to their audience most of the time. They may lurk in on their audience in reader groups to learn what they are enjoying reading. They may write mass emails to their list to share a new release. They may even hop on TikTok to study and capitalize on the hungry book-loving audience there. But outside of that, they usually don't need communication with their audience, and they often don't share much about their true selves with their audience either.
This type is quite happy to be a faceless entity if it's possible. They are able to remove themselves from their books to produce a better product for their readers, and they are able to do so without much personalized or ongoing feedback from the readers themselves
The best way this type can nurture their audience is to give them the next book. That is what the audience cares about–and if they can't get the next book, they may go somewhere else to fill their time. Deserts know and understand this.
SCALING AN AUDIENCE
Deserts are willing to put on their business hats first. They are more likely than other types to gravitate toward heavy advertising, as it tends to be impersonal. Also, because they've made a marketable product, they can usually see quite a bit of success with their targeting, especially when they target specific genres and comparable authors or books.
Still, Deserts may struggle to scale their audiences because they build books that fit a mold (at least when they are starting out). This can make it challenging to stand out, especially as competition creeps in. Paired with the Desert's desire to have some distance from their audience, it can be important for a Desert to figure out what their branding is over the long term. Deserts are prone to having fair weather fans that disappear as trends shift and algorithms change, so finding ways to build reader loyalty and capture reader data (like an email address) is key to scaling.
Does that sound exciting to you? There is so much more inside our membership. If you think this is cool, then you should seriously consider joining our membership. Not only will you learn more about your ecosystem, but we have courses to help accelerate your growth in the next few months.