By Suminona Smith
Book sales are mostly made in one place: Amazon. There are lots of markets where authors can go, but upon trying them all they often realize that the vast majority of their customer conversions happened on Amazon. If this is so, why on earth would we try the dark and mysterious outcast world of cryptocurrency markets and blockchain technology?
More and more authors complain that indie authorship is on its way out after only a brief time on the scene. Is this true? I would argue that this prediction is completely wrong. But things are shifting, and right now the big companies are out for themselves and not us.
Many professions get torpedoed by large corporations doing business with them in the effort to improve their yearly gains by a few points. They just don’t care if they reduce a real career into a hobbyist job even if it will be bad for them in the long run. Welcome to the corporate world.
So why would the up and coming crypto world be a good idea? Right now Amazon reigns king, but KU and increased competition continue to challenge authors. The result has been foolish $0.99 price wars with other authors and it only leads to us all ending up in the red, except for the huge middlemen that profit off our hard work. But the crypto world is a whole other game.
The crypto world is new, blockchain is hot and people are surfing the internet with a crypto wallet burning a hole in their pockets. Wouldn’t you be? It’s fun. When I set up my own cryptographic wallets I found myself wondering where and what I could spend it on. Unlike with the traditional customer going around with a country specific dollar, peso or what have you, the people packing cryptocurrency are in a less frugal or stingy mindset.
Cryptocurrency is far from just air. With words like ether, wings, bits and other empty sounding labels it is understandable to doubt the authenticity or reliability of accepting cryptocurrency for your books. But before you settle with that assumption I would like to bring out four points: 1. Many of these cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects have enormous amounts of money invested in them, 2. Owners of cryptocurrencies are usually tech-hip, intelligent people with enough disposable income to risk some of it in these projects, 3. As producers of digital products ourselves, we are in a unique position to be able to afford taking a risk on selling to this crowd, 4. What’s the risk to directing our attention to this crowd? I really see none.
The crypto audience is currently a lot smaller than audiences found on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and the like, however, the competition is also a much smaller pool. You might just find that it is a lot better to be a big fish on OpenBazaar or Nxt than to be a small fish on Amazon.
That said, the gains for indie authors in going crypto don’t stop with the huge online shopping locations, but continue with browsers as well. Who can afford to do an adwords campaign for their ebooks anymore? Not at the rates adwords gets now for clicks. Facebook is no different, the cost per click ratio, when compared to true conversion (an actual purchase) just leaves little if anything for the author. Why are we working to make these guys money?
Okay, we all agree that is uncool, but is there really a good alternative? Well, again, audiences are considerably smaller, but there are crypto-based ad campaign programs and there are cool new browsers coming around, more friendly to the crypto world than Google, Bing or Facebook. Thrive is a well funded blockchain technology linking advertisers with publishers as well as incentivizing users to allow data collection of their browsing for optimization toward sales performance. Thrive is just one example of a decentralized autonomous organization modeled on traditional ad campaign design and providing permissioned and ethical data collection strategies for the new crypto market ecosystem of web 3.0.
Another interesting aspect of blockchain can be found with a project called Ardor. This blockchain technology is set up to help all sorts of businesses, organizations or individuals form their very own blockchain. Within the Ardor blockchain you can create a thing called a childchain that acts very much as an independent blockchain but is tied to the parent chain Ardor. For authors, this means that you could create your own shop, your own currency if you wanted, but best of all, a full-service environment for your readership. Your ability to reward or encourage your readership to engage with you more actively and to check out your full selection of writings has never before been this easy. You can offer discounts, open access reading, pay-per-page options and more. Do you find the Kindle Unlimited concept beneficial for widening your audience? Make your very own version of it, exclusively showcasing your works.
This very model is what the cool new business BioScrolls are doing with their membership program on their site. All members will have full access to materials and services protected and stored on the wicked cool Arbor platform. Could your business benefit as BioScrolls.com does?
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