What Makes You a Tundra?
The basics of the Tundra archetype.
Have you taken the Author Ecosystem quiz? Find out your archetype here:
https://authorecosystem.com
The Basics of the Tundra Archetype
Most important resource: excitement
Superpowers: Launching, getting people excited and pointing attention to themselves and their work
Examples of Tundras: Tim Ferriss, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Rick Riordan, Russell Nohelty, Melanie Harlow
Tundras love to build cool things and launch them, and they are extremely well-versed in turning a ton of attention to themselves and their project for a short period of time. They are the type to study a platform and see what trends they can tap into to make their next launch bigger, and they are most likely to know how they are going to market and sell something before creating it. Once done with a project, they wipe their hands free of it and rarely think much of it again—the launch is over!
Tundras are naturally able to understand the evergreen trends in a genre and stack them on top of each other in a way that gets people super excited. While a desert focuses on current trends and leaps between them often, and a grassland focuses on emerging trends they can sink their teeth into for years, Tundras generally focus on evergreen trends and find ways to use them in unique ways that will get everyone in their target market excited for a new launch.
Because Tundras survive on a feast and famine cycle, they need to be able to peel as much meat from the bone as possible. Tundras become stackers—stackers of trend, stackers of value, stackers of audience. They are comfortable with having a lot of one-off projects and comfortable with building a diverse audience that only likes a portion of their catalog—though they welcome superfans who enjoy everything, too.
This is why Kickstarter is naturally perfect for Tundras—because we are launchers and know how to get a small, niche audience excited about something cool. While Kickstarter is also great for other ecosystems, Tundras are naturally wired to understand how to use it. While deserts are great at riding trends and grasslands have stickiness, Tundras tend to have a preternatural ability to hit #1 in the Amazon store and use that excitement to keep their books selling.
Healthy Tundras have a firm understanding of their feast seasons and build safeguards to make sure there’s never a point of starvation. They also learn to connect their body of work—usually somewhat disparate projects—under one banner so that every launch offers a bigger feast on their backlist. Unhealthy Tundras struggle to create enough feasts to get through the famine periods, leaving them burnt out and under-resourced before the next launch.
Does this sound like you?
I absolutely love everything about this concept.
I took the quiz and found out I'm a tundra. So much of this archetype makes sense to me, except for one key thing - I've never been good at pointing people to my work. Even though I put a lot of effort into launches (and launches are absolutely my key area of focus just like how it's described here), I feel like no one is ever paying attention. I'm always in starvation mode and my launches get me the kind of 'feast' that I know other authors would see as famine. Am I trying to do something contrary to my archetype maybe? Or am I just bad at being a tundra? I have a few superfans, but I really do mean *a few* - like I could count them on my hands.