NEW YORK—Given the growing flock of collectors who migrate to Miami Beach every December for its edition of Art Basel, it has become as essential for galleries to have a presence there as it for them to have the right address. Capitalizing on the situation is the plethora of new alternative fairs, opening each year. “I’ve started to notice that collectors are saving their money for fairs,” says dealer Caryn Coleman, of the gallery Sixspace in Los Angeles. “It sort of ups the need for galleries to be there in order to survive.”

That, at least in part, is why Coleman is for the first time showing her artists’ work at a Miami fair this year. She’s an exhibitor at the brand-new Aqua fair, one of the events that is piggybacking on the raging success of four-year-old Art Basel Miami Beach. All told, including Art Basel, the already established NADA and Scope fairs, Aqua and another new fair, called Pulse, about 430 galleries will be vying for attention. Surely even the most dedicated collector’s excitement about Miami must be leavened with a sprinkling of dread at the prospect of trying to see everything.

Art Basel debuted its Miami spinoff in 2002, and Scope (which had already built a reputation with its flagship New York edition that ran concurrently with the Armory Show) set up camp nearby at the Townhouse Hotel. In 2003 the plot thickened with the arrival of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair. Although NADA’s quarters that year—a raw, under-construction space adjacent to the convention center that houses Art Basel—had some problems, including a power outage, collectors lined up outside the door before proceeding to buy nearly everything in sight. The following year, NADA once again surmounted venue problems—this time hurricane damage at the Seville Beach Hotel—and quickly made a deal to move into the Ice Palace Film Studios. The buying was even more frenzied than it was the prior year. “The NADA fair represents the crème de la crème of emerging art,” says New York–based curator Simon Watson. “Last year I couldn’t believe the shopping fever. I have to admit I was one of the locusts. We swarmed in and swept it clear in two hours.”

Joining the party last year was the upstart Frisbee fair, organized in a matter of months and set up in the Cavalier Hotel by independent curator Anat Ebgi, with help from artist pals, including Jen DeNike. Although Frisbee is not returning this year—instead, Ebgi is planning a Los Angeles edition in January, to coincide with Art L.A.—it inspired the creation of the Aqua fair. Aqua was thrown together so quickly by Seattle-based artist Jaq Chartier and her husband, gallerist Dirk Park, that at one point Chartier had the entire Aqua hotel reserved on her credit card. She adopted the gallery-friendly policy of offering participants a full refund on their application fees if they got into NADA or Art Basel Miami Beach.

But wait—there’s more. Helen Allen, organizer of the popular AAF fairs (formerly known as Affordable Art Fairs) is introducing Pulse, with the goal of forming a kind of middle ground between established and alternative fairs. An invitational event, Pulse is installing more than 60 galleries—the younger ones in a special section called “Impulse”— in a 30,000-square-foot space that is a stone’s throw from the well-known contemporary art collections of Marty Margulies and Donald and Mera Rubell in Miami’s Wynwood district. A trademark of Pulse is a special curated section comprising works by Miami artists, organized this year by independent curator Jade Dellinger.

Meanwhile, NADA, hardly content to rest on its laurels, is expanding from 61 galleries last year to a whopping 80 this year (31 of them are association members) and is doubling in size thanks to a larger outdoor exhibition area. There are some surprising additions to the exhibitors list, such as Kaikai Kiki, the Japan- and Brooklyn-based company owned by artist Takashi Murakami that produces artwork and art-related merchandise, and manages a group of young Japanese artists of Murakami’s choosing. Kaikai Kiki plans to use the fair to introduce such emerging artists as Mahomi Kunikata.