I’ve seen a fair number of authors and individuals in the publishing industry dismissing the idea of NFT books in recent days.
For example, the CEO of an “award-winning small press” commented yesterday that it was “a pile of unmitigated toss” when it was announced that the largest book distributor in the world (Ingram Content Group) had just partnered with the leading NFT book company in the industry (Book.io.) Another user commented that they stopped reading as soon as they saw the term NFT.
Some of this is no doubt just the standard pushback one gets when new technology threatens old ways of doing things. I remember the same thing happening when eBooks first came on the scene and now they are a substantial portion of the world’s book market. Times change and so does technology, whether we like it or not.
Some of this is in response to overeager media sources hyping what NFT books can do for writers without really understanding what writers actually need. Esquire Magazine’s recent article spotlighting the idea of sharing IP with thousands of fans via book NFTs caused all sorts of pushback from writers and rightfully so.
And some of it is just the all-too human habit of parroting things we’ve heard without really understanding the process behind it all. “Minting NFTs uses more energy than the entire country of Sweden!” Ah, no, they don’t. In fact, even the most serious offender uses less energy that many services used by everyday people, like Netflix, YouTube, and Paypal.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the NFT market is full of projects that have little to no actual utility, often featuring nothing more than pixelated images that look like they belong in an arcade game from the 1980s than in a serious art collection. And don’t get me started on all the Bored Apes derivatives that are trying to replicate the lighting-in-a-bottle moment that made that particular collection so popular. The fact that most people lump NFTs in with the crypto market, flooded with million-dollar hacks and negative connotations, doesn’t help, either.
I get it, I really do.
And yet, despite all this, I think authors casting aside the idea of NFT books are being remarkably short-sighted with respect to what this technology can do for them.
Books on the blockchain – NFT books - solve two of the biggest problems authors face every single day, which are knowing who their customers are and finding ways to easily reach them.
Authors published through the traditional publishing industry have long not been privy to information about who is buying their books. Initially, this was because there was no way of obtaining this information – buyers who walk into a bookstore and buy a book are anonymous, and rightly so.
But as online buying became more popular and eBooks became a major stream of revenue for traditionally and independently published authors alike, this changed. Every electronic transaction has a name and an email address associated with it. This information is being collected by major retailers like Amazon and Apple, but it is not being shared with the creators who are generating the products sold by these marketplaces. I might sell 30,000 copies of a given book from a certain retailer, but the customer information generated by those sales will never be shared with me. The same holds true of any sales generated by books I’ve licensed to traditional publishers. I’m lucky to get basic sales data telling me how many books were sold every six months with no real way of confirming if that data is correct short of a forensic audit, never mind customer information about who actually bought those books.
As a result, I’m forced to find alternate ways of discovering this information, often at either great expense and/or by burning valuable amounts of my time to do so. Even worse, that information is often nothing more than educated guesswork. I’m reduced to using Facebook posts whose reach is algorithmically squashed if I don’t pay for the privilege of reaching my followers or trying to build newsletter lists of readers where even the recipient’s email program works against me by punting my message into the promo folder where it doesn’t get seen in the first place. And so on.
Now substitute the old way of doing all that with NFT books.
Sales information on the blockchain is entirely public. Every transaction is processed from a wallet and the address for that wallet is public. If I sell 30,000 copies of an NFT edition for one of my books, I know every single wallet address that purchased one of those copies.
Suddenly I have a reliable and accurate way of knowing who my customers are simply by using the technology at hand. I am no longer at the mercy of my publishers or my retailers.
Problem one solved.
Now, I might not know the name of the individual associated with that wallet, but I don’t need to. Because I know the wallet address, I now have a way of reaching that individual and a method by which to cultivate a relationship with that person as a fan of my work, all while allowing them to maintain their anonymity and privacy.
Problem two solved.
But that’s not all. Let’s say I want to reward my fans for the simple fact that they ARE my fans. Maybe I want to send them a special-release novella not available anywhere else. Or I want to give them a discount on purchasing the next book in the series. Or invite them to a fan-only gathering at a major event while giving them not just the ticket they need to gain entrance but also a memento of the event itself. I can do all of that via NFTs delivered to that wallet address.
The amount of time and energy that saves me as an author-entrepreneur is incalculable.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Fans who buy my NFTs not only own the book they have purchased (as opposed to licensing it from a retailer like Amazon who can cut off access to that license for any reason whatsoever) but the collectible nature of the books can make that purchase worth more in the future dependent on market conditions and my popularity as an author.
Obviously, as an early adopter of blockchain books – my novel The Heretic will be released as a limited edition NFT by BOOK.io later this month – I’m all in for this technology. But I would urge my fellow authors to consider all of the potential benefits of NFT books before dismissing them out of hand. This is an industry-changing wave that can improve your career in multiple ways and that is well worth your time to investigate.
After all, if the world’s largest distributor of books thinks this is worth their time and investment, don’t you think you should make some educated decisions of your own?