I am a “seasoned” story-writer who has been publishing books since 1998 but am quite a novice in NFT — or crypto in general — as many of the people here may be.
Every time I write an e-book I must create a cover. I often use Creative Commons materials, process them on Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, cut/paste/remix to build the cover image. Over the years I found it enjoyable to create the cover and have improved my skills a lot. Some of the covers that I created looked so good that I started wondering if I might be better at creating images than writing stories!
Then the NFT hype came to the world. As a writer, I was thinking about selling my books at OpenSea. Readers who buy my books on Amazon KDP could go to OpenSea to buy the same books by paying crypt-currencies.
OpenSea does not seem to accept PDF files, and I read about somebody selling books (images of huge text pages) as NFT. However, I was sure that readers would hate opening a huge jpg file to read my book.
I learned about “unlockable content” which I thought would be a good tool to deliver the text content to readers. So, I started thinking about minting my books into NFTs comprising of the cover image as the main body and Epub text as the unlockable content.
The gas fee seemed to be a big problem, so I had to mint them using the Polygon chain.
Before I started minting all my books, I noticed something — readers will surely want to buy my books on Amazon than swapping their ETH into wrapped-ETH, downloading Epub files, and reading them on the smartphone. OpenSea takes only 2.5% and I can get a recurring 10% (if I set it that way in the smart contract), but my readers will hate me if I force them such inconvenience.
My enthusiasm for minting NFTs quickly faded away.
“Wait a minute!”
It was at that time when I noticed that OpenSea is not a good marketplace to sell books — yet. On the other hand, OpenSea is a perfect platform for arts and collectibles. Why shouldn’t I sell my covers as art? I reconsidered the project from zero-base and concluded that I should mint the cover — image in high resolution — and provide Epub text as a bonus only. Instead of minting many copies, I will mint one NFT for each book that I publish. So, there will be the same number of NFTs as the number of books that I write…
So, I created NFTs for all books that I have published.
The result? Well, unfortunately, I had no sales at OpenSea. However, each NFT shows a link to my website, so I hope that my effort was not totally in vain….
