NFTs and Writing

 This is a bit beyond me. I was still incarcerated when NFTs made news. The Rise of the Crypto Writer? On What Literary NFTs Might Mean for the Book World from Lit Hub sets up the issue this way:

Blake Butler had given up on publishing Decade. He’d written the novel in 2008, and its complicated structure and dense language rendered it virtually unpublishable by both commercial and avant-garde standards. For years, he set Decade aside, occasionally opening the Word document and scrolling through as fast as he could, remembering all the work he’d done, then closing the window.

Then this February, as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, flooded the Internet, everywhere from Twitter to The New York Times, Butler had an idea: he turned that scrolling action into a GIF, pages flashing before the viewer’s eye, and minted the GIF as a non-fungible token. With cryptocurrency, a buyer could purchase proof of ownership of Decade, represented by the GIF, as well as receive a PDF of the novel upon purchase. Overnight, a stranger bought the NFT for 5 ethereum—a $7,569.50 value at the time, now the equivalent of $12,377.30, much more than Butler had made off several of his published books. Said Butler, the sale was “like a bolt of lightning to his brain.”

But this makes me, the indigent and homeless blogger take notice:

But an NFT doesn’t have to be a meme or a piece of visual art. It can be anything digital—a trading card, a newspaper article, or even a novel. Because the object represented by the NFT isn’t actually stored on the blockchain, writers can customize the way selling their writing NFTs represents their art. In its most basic form, NFT technology can be used like an ebook: a writer can mint an NFT of a book’s cover and then sell it, and offer the text of the book as a file that can be unlocked upon purchase of the NFT. Several self-published novels like this, attempting to cash in on the NFT trend, claim to be “the first NFT novel.”

But this isn’t the way most writers are working with NFTs. Instead of just tokenizing pieces of text, a new crop of “crypto writers” are using NFT technology in a multiplicity of eye-catching, innovative ways to finance their writing and interact with online consumers. On the more traditional side, Butler turns his novels into visually striking GIFs. Writer Rex Shannon is releasing each page of his novel CPT-415 as an NFT, and each page is made available to the public once it’s sold—so it essentially functions like a time-staggered Patreon, each buyer helping fund access to an ongoing body of work. 

And then there is what can  be done for more than making money:

NFTs are a way for experimental writers to experiment with form—especially writers whose interests lie in technology. Butler was a computer science major in college and has been active in crypto for a while; his latest traditionally published novel, Alice Knott, deals with art’s perceived value and digital trends. For him, NFTs are a logical tool of expression. Rex Shannon’s work is heavily inspired by video games and levels, hence the serialized format: “The Internet is so much a part of [my novel] that it only made sense for the Internet to be of its platform,” he told me. “NFTs are of-the-Internet, and so is my book.” 

And there are plenty of drawbacks including:

If you think about NFTs too long, you’ll end up staring into the maw of value theory; if you’re not already familiar with cryptocurrency, it’s hard to wrap your head around, to say nothing of the technological barrier to entry. Just look at the series of articles in mainstream publications over the past few months trying to explain NFTs in layman’s terms. And with no robust secondary market for crypto writing, there’s not an incentive for those not already in the know to put in the effort.

But what a brave new world it is, but I am not sure if it is the coming thing or a fad.