Building a team using Author Ecosystems

When authors start learning about the Author Ecosystems, they use it to learn about themselves, but it's is equally powerful in building out a team around your work.

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When authors start learning about the Author Ecosystems, they generally map it onto their own experience to learn about themselves, but our system is equally powerful in building out a team around your work. Whether you’re working by yourself, co-writing with a partner, working in a shared world, building an anthology, expanding your business with a small team, or developing a full publishing slate, the author ecosystem can help you grow your business.

We’ve already talked extensively about the evolution path for every ecosystem, including how to identify ecosystems in other people for the sake of your personal growth, but not everyone wants to embrace every ecosystem inside themselves. Many authors would prefer to hire for different positions inside their business, and we think that’s great. It’s probably essential to hire beyond yourself to succeed as an author.

At Writer MBA, being able to identify the qualities we need in a role and map them onto a specific ecosystem, then hire somebody in that ecosystem, has revolutionized our hiring practices. We know that we don’t do everything well. For instance, both Monica and I are just dreadful Forests. That might seem kind of incredible since The Author Ecosystems is an intrinsically Forest-based shared language and culture system, but we’re not good at engaging with fans or fostering that culture in any of our businesses.

Instead, we look for people to partner with who fill in our deficiencies. Mel Jolly and Tawdra Kandle, the conference director for our Writer MBA conference are both incredible Forests with heavy Aquatic tendencies. They are great at the engage and delight areas of the flywheel that we laid out previously. Meanwhile, Monica and I are great at the Attract stage of the flywheel and in building a sales funnel. Monica can embrace her inner Desert through analyzing data, a natural skill of a Grassland, and I can build out the top of the funnel by starting at the bottom and working up, a natural strength of a Tundra.

This is a graphic showing the strength of each ecosystem in the funnel/flywheel model.

Even though we would love to hire a Desert who was naturally great at those aspects, our biggest deficits have been in the Forest and Aquatic bits of our business, which is where Mel and Tawdra shine.

So, let’s talk about how to use the Author Ecosystems to build out a team inside your business. This is one of the few times where you will find us breaking from our normal format of talking about the ecosystems in the standard Desert, Grassland, Tundra, Forest, Aquatic order. I think it’s more important to visualize these positions when they would be relevant to your business instead of how we’ve been talking about them so far.

Before I get to it, I want to state that if you work in one of these roles and aren’t the ecosystem we recommend seeking out for that task, it doesn’t make you bad at your job. There are aspects of every ecosystem that can help in each of these roles, and you might be great at embracing bits of an ecosystem that is not your own. This is only a thought exercise.

Hire 1: Editorial

Almost every author’s first hire will be an editor, whether that’s a developmental editor, a copy editor, or a proofreader.

In this role, you’ll likely be looking for somebody detail-oriented who can hold a lot of disparate threads in their head at any one time. An editor’s job is to make sure everything flows properly and makes sense as a cohesive whole. Because of this, the ideal person for this role is a Grassland, whose superpower is depth.

We believe this is why most anthologies and shared world projects fail. These types of projects are almost always proposed by Forests, who want to build community and shared language through collaboration, and they fall apart either because those Forests misjudge the market or because they have no interest in making sure everything fits as one cohesive whole. Additionally, Forests attract a lot of Forests, who don’t like writing to spec and thus all the stories are wildly off the mark.

Grasslands, with their ability to forecast the future and deep-seated interest in intricate detail, are perfect for this role in any organization. If you’re hiring at a publishing company, look for Grasslands to fill your EIC roles and plan out your content calendar. Grasslands are also great at predicting cover trends and making sure you’re meeting the market where it will be in 18-24 months when your books launch.

Hire 2: Community Management

Once you’ve had some success, the next place authors usually turn to for help is in community management. Since half the industry is filled with Deserts, Grasslands, and Tundras who are generally uninterested in community above writing new stories for them, this makes sense. Some authors have a natural affinity for community and fostering engagement with their readers, and those kinds of people are going to be equally good at helping you build your community.

It should be no surprise that we think Forests are perfect for this role. These are the people who love to dig deep with fans and create posts specifically for fan engagement instead of growth. They are masters at getting people to open up and constructing a community in a way that feels like a safe space.

Aside from Forests and Aquatics, the other Ecosystems are most interested in growth above engagement, and you really need to pick one or the other as your target.

One of the things I learned by hiring my own engagement people is that engagement requires completely rewiring your brain to write posts that foster that kind of community. You can’t just put “Leave us a comment” in a post and expect engagement. With The Author Stack, I can tell which articles are going to have high engagement before they get out the door.

Ironically, these are often the articles with the lowest overall readership, but they’ll have 10x the comments of another article even though fewer people read it. I’ve tried hard to write the kinds of articles that get tons of engagement and I’m just not good at it. It’s a skill deeply embedded into the writing process, which is one reason Forests also make good editors. They will bring that out of your work and make you feel seen in the process. However, if you have a deeply complex world, they are less good at holding all of it in their head than focusing on really great character interactions that resonate with your readers.

Hire 3: Ads management

The biggest mistake that writers make when building a team is hiring the same person to handle their community and their ads. I have been running ads for years and the only constant has been that the ads with the best engagement are never the ones that get the most sales conversion.

If you want sales from your ads, it’s best not to hire a Forest to run them. Because so many authors hire for community first, the vast majority of VAs are Forests. Authors see how well they do in one aspect of their business and try to jam them into another part they hate, namely advertising, with disastrous results.

That’s because ads require a ton of optimizations and data analysis, which goes against every strength of a Forest, so they almost always struggle with ads. Deserts, on the other hand, are amazing at ads management (as are Grasslands) because they love digging into the data. Additionally, they will know what’s hot right now, because they follow that type of thing, and stay on top of how to get the most out of your ad spend.

Deserts also make amazing cover designers because they are not swayed by a community or even their author clients. They are locked into following what’s hot in the market right now. For this reason, if you have a Desert cover designer, do not engage them until very late in the process, because they are going to give you a cover that’s hot at the moment. If you hold it for years, your cover won’t reflect those trends and your book will suffer for it.

The one constant thing we see in advertising is that you should absolutely not hire your Forest VA to run your ads, even if they are amazing at running your community. Hire a Desert or a Grassland to run your ads, or help foster your VA to evolve their Desert energy to help you, but don’t expect them to be great out of the gate.

Hire 4: Launch team

Eventually, your author business will grow to the point where you’re capping out at what you can earn with ad optimizations and community management alone, and want to bring on somebody to help you launch better. That might mean getting to #1 in the store, packaging your books so people spend more money, or planning your prelaunch more effectively to maximize excitement.

This is where a Tundra can really help you. By the time you get to this point, you’ve probably got a slamming series, with an engaged community, and your ads are profitable. Now, you need to expand your profit and bring more attention to every launch, and Tundras traffic in excitement. They can help you put together a more powerful offer for your series that will get the attention of the industry, and help you take advantage of every day of your launch.

These are the PR consultants who craft your sales pitch so it’s as enticing to as many people as possible. These are the editors that you bring on to help you incorporate more evergreen trends and tropes into your work for maximum effectiveness. Tundras can really help with a “USA Today list run”, if those even exist anymore, to get you a lot of exposure and sales in a concentrated timeframe. If you’ve been writing in relative obscurity and you are ready to get noticed, or especially if you launching a Kickstarter, you want a Tundra on your team.

Hire 5: Brand expansion

Now that you’re rocking and rolling, having piqued the interest of the industry and shown you have a viable brand, you’ll want to expand outside of books into other modalities, and this is where an Aquatic can be especially helpful.

It usually takes them a long time to get their own brand built from scratch, but they can be like gasoline on the fire of a successful business because they naturally understand the different areas where you can expand your brand. Whether it’s into new platforms or new formats, Aquatics always seem to know the important players and have relationships they can leverage to grow your business quickly. You might not think of hiring an Aquatic because their business is usually small until it explodes, but their minds work in a way very different from the average author and they can be an invaluable addition to your team.

Additionally, many successful authors want to hold events or special offers to delight their fans, and Aquatics are masters of this type of delight. They are walking bundles of joy to fans because they are always looking for ways to delight them with something new. This is why they have the highest brand loyalty of any ecosystem.

Final thoughts

No matter your ecosystem, partnering with people in other ecosystems can help you grow. Whenever I go onto a podcast hosted by a Forest, I can almost always make it their most watched episode because I bring the excitement, while their articles on my publication almost always have incredible engagement, helping build loyalty to what I’m doing on my own.

As a Tundra, I often partner with successful authors to give their launches a boost, and implementing my strategies usually gives them the best launch of my career, and better than I can do on my own.

It wasn’t until Monica, a Grassland, and me, a Tundra, built a company together that we got the kind of traction either of us wanted, and bringing in universally loved Forests and Aquatics like Mel and Tawdra made everyone want to work with us because they already wanted to work with them.

While we should all be working to evolve ourselves, to expand your business it almost always means looking outside ourselves and partnering or hiring with other ecosystems to get where we want to go.

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If you haven’t had a chance to take our quiz yet, I highly recommend taking it before you read this article. Additionally, if you haven’t taken a look at our membership options, I think they are pretty neat.

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