My NFT Book Is Coming
What’s taking so long?
Short answer: an NFT book like this has never been done before.
When my editor Ismael Gomez García from Editorial Ferragosto and I decided to publish my novel Quién te manda as an NFT, we researched all the NFT platforms to see which would be the best one to launch it. We soon discovered that almost none of the existing platforms supported the format we wanted.
We envisioned and designed an actual digital book as an NFT. Not like what you read on your Kindle, nor a PDF file with a token attached, but an art object designed to be collected and experienced digitally as a book.
Most NFT platforms did not support large files or our format. Some platforms didn’t offer the royalties and smart contract splits we wanted. And all of them were NFT marketplaces dedicated to visual art.
So we decided on an innovative new publishing platform on the blockchain that aims to provide a much more meaningful experience than an NFT marketplace. It is called The Platform.
As I wrote in this article:
“Most NFT platforms… were designed to market the art efficiently, not to provide background about artists and their process... The Platform looks to correct this deficiency by publishing content that is directly related to the art, allowing artists to publish and mint their own NFTs with context as a package. The Platform, “will look like a magazine or a book but overlaid with marketplace functionalities that will allow people to purchase.” That is, it is a place for people to find content to read, a better home for my novel and the other literary NFTs we are planning to launch.
The Platform also happens to be a DAO built on the cooperative model. It has four groups of stakeholders: builders, funders, the publications creating the content, and the collectors reading it. Anyone can collect the NFTs or read them for free in The Platform but people can also subscribe. Subscribers become members of the DAO and get the benefits of DAO membership. This means that…
We’re building everything from scratch.
Quien te manda is slated to be the first publication to appear in The Platform. And The Platform offers a very attractive model for publishers which is being refined and tested as we speak. As publishers, we get our own contract, custom revenue and royalty splits, flexibility of file sizes and formats, storage in Arweave, a deployable front end so Ferragosto can have its own storefront, open source tools, and the opportunity to co-own and steward the whole endeavor with The Platform community.
Because the format of our book is different, the process to connect the smart contracts to the front end is a bit more complex than minting a jpeg.
The good news is, we are very close.
In the meantime, if you’d like to be one of the first people to collect this seminal edition of only 100 copies (at 0.1 ETH), sign up here.
Make sure that you bridge your ETH to Palm, since Palm is the protocol with which the Platform will operate, for very low gas fees and more sustainability.
In the end, I think it is worth the wait to give my NFT novel the best home it can have: a thoughtful and innovative community designed to benefit artists and writers, who will be the owners and stewards of its future.
Please join me next Wednesday July 20 at 3 pm EST for a Twitter Spaces with Sparrow Read about “The Myth of Independence for Artists in Web 3. How Do We Fix This.” I will talk about the novel and this new publishing model.
Thank you for bearing with us. Please join our Discord for questions and more conversation and follow me on Twitter @grandenchilada.
