Unpacking the Desert Archetype
The defining traits of a Desert
In a Nutshell
Superpowers: Ability to spot trends before others, ease at producing books that readers are excited about, ability to make business decisions within writing the book
Challenges: Writing generic books, building brand loyalty, chasing trends that readers abandon (making it hard to build a profitable back catalog)
Motivations: Building a hassle-free business that can support them and their other creative endeavors
Every healthy business needs a way to produce new offers, a way to grow an audience, and a way to bring in sales. Here’s what might work best for those identifying as a Desert:
What Would Likely Work Best For Production
Market research and trends -
Deserts are masterful at market research and trends, and often come up with the right answer when looking at the data. They are able to study the market and find pockets of underserved markets, but more importantly, they are nimble and can pivot to that underserved market quickly.
This type also has a strong sense of what readers want. They are able to pick it out quickly and easily, usually by studying the story beats of what is already selling. The best Deserts are not only looking at their genre, but also at adjacent genres and the larger storefront.
Deserts tend to compartmentalize stories. They are able to break down tropes and scene imagery to find clear patterns. And then, they are able to put those pieces back together again to deliver what readers want from that genre or niche.
While Deserts can sometimes create new categories of sub-genre or sub-niche, they more often see a trend—and act on it—before most of the rest of the community catches on. In this way, they are early adopters.
Creating content and products -
Deserts may love writing their stories, but they are also able to disconnect and put on their business hat while writing those stories.
This type tends to create products that are right in the middle of the market. If witches are more popular than angels, then the main character is a witch. If a male captain is more popular than a female captain, then the character is male. In doing this, they create stories that hit the market or trend dead on.
Healthy Deserts know that their books have some level of shelf life. Markets expand and contract, and Deserts are fantastic at hitting the market as it's expanding. But they always know that the contraction is coming as the market gets flooded with competition and as their particular story becomes a commodity. Those who have mastered the game are able to incorporate enough evergreen trends to keep their back catalog fruitful, and are also able to pivot quickly when they see the market contracting.
Deserts thrive when they build a catalog that has a unique branding aspect, but that can also keep pace with trends. There may be some tradeoff as a result, but the most successful Deserts know how to hit each trope while also elevating it.
Pacing and scheduling production -
Deserts tend to write and release quickly–usually every few months. This allows them to stay both fluid and flush with resources. Hungry readers demand their stories now—and Deserts are usually the one type that is willing and able to deliver.
Although this type might write a lot, they are usually writing to buy themselves time and money. Sometimes they are writing just so they can otherwise live their life and not be bothered. Other times they are writing X so they can free up time to write Y—with Y being the thing they really love but they know they can't make enough money on to satisfy their goals. Deserts are also strong at writing to pursue a greater ambition. Maybe their dream is movies or television, for example, and they know that a certain path will get them there.
At the end of the day, Deserts see publishing as a business first, then a creative endeavor. This approach can be baffling for other types who struggle to disconnect from their creative side in order to make smarter and more strategic business decisions. But Deserts are attracted to this business for many reasons: freedom, flexibility, and potential earnings. The creative outlet is only valuable when it is also profitable.
What Would Likely Work Best For Audience
Finding 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 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.
Meanwhile, if Deserts want to create a community at all (and of all the types, Deserts are least likely to want to do that), then they should probably join communities filled with readers where new trends are happening so they can interact directly with readers to collect data on what readers actually care about right now.
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 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.
Famous Desert Authors
Dan Brown, William Shakespeare, EL James, Suzanne Collins (screenwriting background)