What Are NFTs and How Can Authors Use Them?

If you’ve spent more than 30 min­utes on the inter­net late­ly, you’ve prob­a­bly already heard about NFTs. Sto­ries abound of artists auc­tion­ing JPEGs for mil­lions of dol­lars in the ever-grow­ing com­mu­ni­ty of cryp­to enthu­si­asts. South Car­oli­na-based artist Beeple famous­ly sold his EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS piece (a col­lage of 5,000 dig­i­tal images from his col­lec­tion of the same name) for $69 mil­lion at Christie’s, a sum so mind-bog­gling that it earned a right­ful place in news­pa­per head­lines around the world. And, for all that cash, buy­er Vig­nesh Sun­dare­san got to call dibs on an image any­body can just down­load online.

If you’re con­fused, you have every right to be. I’m a soft­ware engi­neer in my ear­ly 30s, and I’ve nev­er felt so close to what my dad must’ve expe­ri­enced back in the 90s when he first heard about “the inter­net”. Even if it seems like tech­nol­o­gy is head­ing into bizarre places, we, as authors, can’t afford to fall behind. We should­n’t let the mag­ic com­put­er box intim­i­date us. Instead, we can open our minds, learn more about these insane trends, and make them work in our favor.

So, we arrive at the ques­tion we’re here to answer: what are NFTs, and how can authors lever­age this tech­no­log­i­cal mad­ness to take our work to the next level?

The ini­tial NFT craze left me lost and clue­less at first. But, after some in-depth research, I was able to descend the steep learn­ing curve to tru­ly under­stand NFTs, their val­ue, and how they can become the next great art form. Armed with this new knowl­edge, I decid­ed to write this arti­cle to help you nav­i­gate these strange waters and avoid the same per­ils I did.

The fundamentals

To use NFTs in our favor, it’s nec­es­sary to under­stand a few fun­da­men­tals first. If you’re already some­what knowl­edge­able about cryp­tocur­ren­cy and the blockchain, this might feel repet­i­tive. Feel free to skip this bit—it’s not like it took a lot of work to put togeth­er and my heart will break into a mil­lion pieces or any­thing (spoil­er: it will).

What are NFTs?

NFT stands for non-fun­gi­ble token. In plain Eng­lish, an NFT is some­thing unique and non-repro­ducible. For illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es, let’s say you have a dog. You’ve spent years togeth­er, and it has become your entire world. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, noth­ing lasts for­ev­er. One fate­ful day, your dog pass­es away. You hurt and grieve, and, after a few years go by, you final­ly bring your­self to get anoth­er one. But, despite how great this new dog is, it will nev­er fill the void your old friend left in your soul. That’s because your first dog is non-fun­gi­ble—there was no oth­er one like it and there nev­er will be. It can­not be replaced.

Some folks explain NFTs using an exam­ple of the Mona Lisa and how although we can make copies of it, they’ll nev­er be the same as the orig­i­nal. It’s a good exam­ple, but I thought some­thing more per­son­al would help you bet­ter grasp the con­cept. Sor­ry if I made you sad.

So, we now know that some­thing that is non-fun­gi­ble can­not be repli­cat­ed. But, what does token mean in this con­text? A token is sim­ply a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of something.

There­fore, when put togeth­er, a non-fun­gi­ble token is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of some­thing unique and non-repro­ducible. We can also see it as a title of own­er­ship over a col­lectible. Going back to the Mona Lisa exam­ple, buy­ing the NFT is like buy­ing the title deed of the orig­i­nal work. It’s ours now. We might as well walk into the Lou­vre, grab the paint­ing under our arm, and ride the bus back home. The same goes for Beeple’s EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS. The buy­er did­n’t pay $69 mil­lion for a JPEG; he paid for the title of own­er­ship over the orig­i­nal art. He’s now free to sell it when­ev­er and to whomev­er he pleas­es (and prob­a­bly for a far high­er price). 

But, if we’ve had titles for ages, how are NFTs different? 

The answer is decen­tral­iza­tion and immutabil­i­ty. NFTs are stored in a spe­cial pub­lic data­base called the blockchain. We’ll dive deep­er into that next, but, long sto­ry short, nobody (human or machine) can tam­per with the data stored in the blockchain. While titles can be forged and peo­ple tricked into buy­ing some­thing they think is orig­i­nal, every trans­ac­tion asso­ci­at­ed with NFTs is pub­lic. Any­body can see who was the orig­i­nal author and who cur­rent­ly owns it. If that own­er isn’t us, we’ll only make a fool out of our­selves try­ing to sell that forgery.

What is the blockchain?

The blockchain is a con­cept often asso­ci­at­ed with cryp­tocur­ren­cies (e.g., Bit­coin). In sim­ple Eng­lish, the blockchain is just a type of data­base. For exam­ple, the trans­ac­tions that deter­mine the bal­ance of your sav­ings account are stored in a data­base owned by your bank. They have com­plete access to that data and can do what­ev­er they want with it; it’s owned by a sin­gle enti­ty. Although unlike­ly, what hap­pens if a hack­er gets access to it? They could make dras­tic, irrev­o­ca­ble changes. Such cen­tral­ized data­bas­es are vul­ner­a­ble if they’re not prop­er­ly secured.

On the oth­er hand, the blockchain is a dis­trib­uted data­base. Thou­sands of com­put­ers world­wide hold a copy of the entire data. To change that data, all of those com­put­ers need to agree. If some­one attempts to tam­per with the data in one loca­tion, it’ll be blocked as the major­i­ty won’t agree with the change. That hack­er will then be flagged as a dirty cheater and banned from ever par­tic­i­pat­ing in the blockchain again.

The blockchain stores the NFTs and their entire his­to­ry, includ­ing who orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed it, who has owned it, and who the cur­rent own­er is. And not only that, but all the infor­ma­tion is pub­lic and can be ver­i­fied by any­one. All this is to say that the data in the blockchain is immutable and incorruptible.

How are NFTs made?

There are sev­er­al ways to cre­ate NFTs, but the eas­i­est is through an NFT mar­ket­place. There, we can eas­i­ly “mint” (“cre­ate”), auc­tion, sell, trans­fer, and buy NFTs as well as NFT col­lec­tions. One of the most pop­u­lar mar­ket­places is OpenSea, which, by the way, car­ries Beeple’s EVERYDAYS col­lec­tion. 

It’s essen­tial to remem­ber that mar­ket­places are just store­fronts to the blockchain that stores the NFTs. All mar­ket­places share the same data­base. While OpenSea lists Beeple’s col­lec­tions, it does­n’t mean that they’re only avail­able there. Nifty Gate­way, anoth­er pop­u­lar mar­ket­place, also lists his pieces.

How do artists use NFTs?

As you may have noticed, NFTs are com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with visu­al art. Mar­ket­places let artists asso­ciate their fresh­ly mint­ed NFTs to the orig­i­nal asset (a high-res­o­lu­tion image or video) and a set of attrib­ut­es. Dig­i­tal col­lectibles such as cards are a com­mon type of col­lec­tion where an image of a char­ac­ter is unique­ly repli­cat­ed with vary­ing attrib­ut­es (includ­ing hair col­or and style, age, gen­der, etc.). This can give a spe­cif­ic NFT rar­i­ty. For exam­ple, only one char­ac­ter in the col­lec­tion has hazel eyes. Famous col­lec­tions include Doo­dles, Cryp­toP­unks, and Galac­t­i­cApes.

Oth­er col­lec­tions, such as Beeple’s, are clos­er to some­thing like pieces in a muse­um. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, some art col­lec­tors “con­vert” phys­i­cal art pieces into an NFT by destroy­ing the orig­i­nal work. One of the most promi­nent cas­es was the burn­ing of an orig­i­nal work by Banksy, which now lives for­ev­er in the blockchain as a dig­i­tized version.

Cryptocurrency

NFT mar­ket­places don’t use tra­di­tion­al cur­ren­cies (like the dol­lar) because the blockchain has its own mon­ey. The most pop­u­lar (and orig­i­nal) blockchain for NFTs is Ethereum. To trans­act on Ethereum, we’ll have to get our­selves some Ether, its native dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy. Just like how we need to use local cur­ren­cy to buy things in a for­eign coun­try, we’ll need to do the same for each blockchain. 

But, where can we exchange dol­lars for Ether? And, more impor­tant­ly, if we sell an NFT and get paid in Ether, how can we get dol­lars back in order to buy things in the “real world”? With­out delv­ing too far into the details of buy­ing and sell­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy, you can sim­ply sell your Ether through a cryp­to exchange like Coin­base. It’s the same as exchang­ing dol­lars for euros, for example.

How can authors use NFTs?

Now that we have the basics of NFTs down, it’s time to dis­cuss how to put them to work in the lit­er­ary world. While there are count­less col­lec­tions of visu­al art in NFT mar­ket­places, lit­er­ary NFT projects are a lit­tle more scarce as of now. Writer Anand Girid­haradas is an exam­ple of an ear­ly pio­neer with his Win­ners Take All col­lec­tion. As the descrip­tion declares, it’s “an exper­i­ment in apply­ing NFTs to the lit­er­ary world”. This is a cru­cial point: adapt­ing the NFT medi­um to lit­er­a­ture takes a good amount of exper­i­men­ta­tion and creativity. 

Oth­er cre­ative projects in this space include The Chain­tale by Ital­ian artist Brick­wall, which lets the buy­er of his lat­est NFT write the next install­ment in the series like an inter­ac­tive game. It might sound com­plex and involved. How­ev­er, if I’ve learned any­thing, it’s that the cryp­to com­mu­ni­ty is very much into the intri­cate and sophis­ti­cat­ed. If any­thing, it makes the project that much more unique and valuable.

There are sev­er­al ways authors can make their entrance into the NFT space, from cre­at­ing a lim­it­ed run of our lat­est book to turn­ing cen­tral pas­sages into an image or devel­op­ing trad­ing cards of pri­ma­ry char­ac­ters. Some pur­suits are eas­i­er than oth­ers, but, as I men­tioned ear­li­er, the NFT space is main­ly a visu­al one, so visu­al con­tent is pre­ferred. In the end, it’s the same as cre­at­ing merch for our works.

Before mov­ing on, let’s always remem­ber this gold­en rule: only pub­lish some­thing that we would see our­selves want­i­ng and pay­ing for. We would­n’t pay for a cheap GIF that offers no real val­ue, would we? Look to devel­op some­thing unique and spe­cial that your audi­ence will get excit­ed about. After all, for authors, expand­ing our reach into NFTs isn’t just about mak­ing mon­ey; it allows us to engage with exist­ing read­ers in a new fash­ion. It also lets us reach an untapped audi­ence for our work. A lit­tle bit of effort can go a long way.

The first copy of our book

There’s only one first copy. To me, that sounds like the per­fect use case for an NFT. For our next book, we can con­sid­er cre­at­ing an NFT giv­ing the buy­er own­er­ship of the very first dig­i­tal copy. We can prefer­ably cus­tomize that copy to make it as unique as pos­si­ble, like using a spe­cial cov­er (with cus­tom art, dif­fer­ent lay­out, let­ter col­or­ing, etc.), a signed cov­er, a per­son­al­ized thanks in the intro, or any oth­er extra con­tent to make it special.

Some com­pa­nies also offer ser­vices to cre­ate phys­i­cal NFTs, mean­ing that the first copy could be an actu­al, phys­i­cal hard copy. In that case, we can try out more ideas like a spe­cial hard­cov­er. What would we like to see from a tru­ly unique first copy if we were one of our readers?

A limited run of our book

In addi­tion to a unique, super spe­cial first copy of our book, we can also make a lim­it­ed run of the same—a spe­cial edi­tion, if you will. Our audi­ence might not see it as some­thing as spe­cial as a first copy, but it will be more acces­si­ble to a broad­er part of our audi­ence. Again, we should pri­mar­i­ly strive to bring our read­ers val­ue rather than mon­ey into our pock­ets; usu­al­ly, the for­mer results in the lat­ter anyway. 

For lim­it­ed runs, we can cre­ate a sep­a­rate, num­bered NFT per copy and list it on the mar­ket­place. There must be some­thing spe­cial about those copies though. For exam­ple, we can con­sid­er mak­ing a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the cov­er fea­tur­ing the run num­ber, the name of the lim­it­ed edi­tion (if any), and a spe­cial note inside. What would make you want one of those copies as a reader?

Short stories with a hidden storyline

We can real­ly go the extra mile by cre­at­ing short sto­ries that exist as sep­a­rate branch­es off of the main sto­ry­lines of our nov­els. To make the NFT as visu­al as pos­si­ble, we can offer cus­tom cov­er art in addi­tion to the PDF file of the sto­ry. The more unique the sto­ry, the bet­ter. Also, con­sid­er throw­ing in spe­cial thanks and oth­er good­ies to make the own­er feel like they’re hold­ing some­thing one of a kind and unforgettable. 

Collectibles related to our book’s lore

As men­tioned before, if we can cre­ate phys­i­cal merch for our books, then it’s pos­si­ble to cre­ate NFTs as well. For exam­ple, we already have an idea of what our char­ac­ters look like and their attrib­ut­es. We can now lever­age that to mint a col­lec­tion of our char­ac­ters in the form of col­lectible cards. If we’re writ­ing fan­ta­sy, sci-fi, or oth­er sto­ries with rich lore, we can also have cards of arti­facts, loca­tions, mag­ic, etc. 

This might require work­ing with an artist or some­one who can pro­duce pro­fes­sion­al-qual­i­ty images wor­thy of an NFT. It does­n’t have to be super expen­sive either. Some artists may be even will­ing to con­sid­er tak­ing a cut of the NFT’s sales—many com­ic book projects work under this mod­el. Even if we end up pay­ing for design ser­vices upfront, if we’ve come up with some­thing tru­ly unique, there’s a strong pos­si­bil­i­ty we’ll make our mon­ey back (and then some).

Never-before-seen, unedited material

Last but not least, we have the good ol’ exclu­sive, unedit­ed mate­r­i­al. This can include ear­ly ver­sions of our drafts, pre­views of our cov­er art, delet­ed char­ac­ters or oth­er sto­ry ele­ments, and much more. That file sit­ting in the desk­top recy­cle bin might offer our most loy­al fans an exclu­sive look into our process. Con­sid­er just how valu­able that man­u­script some­one found tucked away in J.R.R Tolkien’s draw­er is today. 

I’ve talked with some of my read­ers, and, when I men­tion ear­ly ver­sions of my book cov­ers, they find them inter­est­ing and valu­able. As the author, it’s some­times hard to con­cep­tu­al­ize what’s best suit­ed for an NFT. If we’re strug­gling to come up with ideas, we can always ask our audi­ence what they would like to see released.

Final thoughts

In sum­ma­ry, NFTs rep­re­sent items that are unique and valu­able. They pro­vide a new, pow­er­ful medi­um of dis­tri­b­u­tion for our lit­er­ary work in a tru­ly exclu­sive, pre­mi­um, and per­son­al fash­ion to our loy­al read­er base. If we can cre­ate merch for our books, we can also cre­ate NFTs.

In order to catch on, how­ev­er, they should be our most valu­able and exclu­sive good­ies. We always have to strive for val­ue and think of what we would like to see (and pur­chase) as a read­er. If we wouldn’t buy it our­selves, it’s like­ly our read­ers won’t either. Lit­er­ary NFTs are still very new, but there’s plen­ty of poten­tial for us authors to take our work to the next lev­el. Now’s the time to exper­i­ment and explore this new form of media. 

In this arti­cle, we dis­cussed what NFTs are and how authors can put them to work for their own ben­e­fit. As the NFT space con­tin­ues to evolve, there will be ample oppor­tu­ni­ty to take advan­tage of new blockchain projects; we’ve real­ly only scratched the sur­face in terms of the val­ue of NFTs and digitization.

I hope this has helped reframe your think­ing of what’s pos­si­ble when pro­mot­ing your writ­ten work and engag­ing with your audi­ence. Let me know if you’d like to see a deep­er dive into NFTs and oth­er cryp­to top­ics for writ­ers. Per­haps this can become a new series.

Did you already know about NFTs? Have you tried exper­i­ment­ing with them?

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