Future of self-publishing and web3 by Khea Chang

Transcript

he couldn't see me back there but I was like nodding my head at a bunch of stuff I feel like crossing the chasm holds up it's one of those things that it's been around for a while but I recently reread it it's a good one up next we've got a talk about self-publishing and web3 and give a warm welcome to Kia Chang API engineer at covalent [Applause] thank you thank you so much and hi everybody my name is Kia and I'm an API engineer at covalent so today I'm going to talk about how web3 can improve

the way that we self-publish online so why did I choose to choose to speak about this topic um hackathons I've seen a lot of submissions using nfts to rethink the structure of royalties ownership and artistic recognition in the creative field especially in music writing and the Arts so clearly this is where we see a clear use case for weapon I'm really looking forward to see what comes out of the hackathon at Denver this year uh on our personal note I've always been someone who's really enjoyed reading and as an Avid Reader I think naturally you start wondering how the idea of a story or an idea comes out of someone's head

and onto pen and paper or I guess a Word document nowadays and into your hands as a published book so just briefly going over today's agenda I'm going to briefly talk about the limitations of web 2 self-publishing platforms and go over some Innovations of web 3 platforms we'll take a look at some on-chain publishing data from mirror.xyz and I'll wrap up with how web2 self-publishing platforms can adopt some of the web 3 principles so to understand the issues and why it's important that web 2 self-publishing exists I'm going to briefly explain how traditional publishing works so traditional publishing existed for

literally centuries and centuries so the household names like penguin Random House Harper Collins or academic Publishers like Oxford University press they're all examples of traditional publishing it is extremely difficult for a writer to get published via traditional publishing especially if you're a first-time writer with no history of Book Sales so the process usually goes like this you will write a book proposal try to find a literary agent that will represent you and sell your proposal to Publishers if you're lucky enough to get an offer you will probably get a pretty small Advance just enough to really live off of until you finish your book uh once your book is out hopefully does well you will probably get around a

seven and a half percent rotary rate for paperbacks and 25 on eBook sales so this is an extremely high barrier of entry with a pretty disappointing earning potentials writers that are come household names are very much the exception in the industry so this is why a lot of writers choose to bypass the traditional route and go directly to self-publishing directly to the online Market so self-publishing as I said is when the author bypasses the traditional book publisher wrote so this allows the author to maintain most of the creative control and most of the profits as well from their sales however they do have to absorb all of the publishing costs such as distribution and marketing of your

book so some of the most successful books that started off as a self-published are Tales of Peter Rabbit sure we've all read that as a kid and welcome honey by Ruby Carr so if you're a teenage girl circa 2014 2015 sure you've seen a lot of those excerpts on Tumblr Instagram or social media so yeah those are two books that came from self-publishing and they become popular so they're picked up by traditional publishers so because of the high cost and the time commitment to self-publish one of the most commonly used Solutions is Amazon's Kindle drag publishing so this is data from 2019 but Amazon has 83 percent of the market share of the publishing space so an overwhelming amount

the most popular I guess successful Amazon self-published book is the Martian by Andy Weir sure some of you have heard of that it was mainton movie with Matt Damon um so yeah this is like at the big con of publishing on Amazon in my opinion is that you are feeding into the model if you are allowing Amazon to get bigger and bigger market share of the space however it is also extremely hard to Market yourself out of all the Amazon eBooks on their platform nowadays we see a lot of self-publishing come from the form of newsletters blogs or multi-series fictional series on web 2 platforms like sub stock and medium I'm sure everyone is very familiar it's

very popular amongst web 2 web 3 VCS entrepreneurs and thought leaders Samsung Media does provide a solution for self-published writers to distribute their writing cheaply and grow a community however some of the cons are writers don't really make a lot of money on these platforms less than 10 percent of writers on medium earn over a hundred dollars a month another big con is that writers can't they do not own their content and cannot they cannot take their supports and subscribers with them should they choose to leave the platform or they may be kicked off the platform due to their platforms terms and conditions so as I write on these platforms you are very much tied to what the platform says you can or cannot publish and they are free

to update those terms and conditions whenever they would like so now comes web3 self-publishing dapps notably the most commonly known ones are mayor.xyz and paragraph.xyz so these are decentralized publishing and writing platforms that stores The Writer's Works permanently on the blockchain and supports and helps support them by making their writings mintable so how does this work so um a brief overview of their Tech stock is they are mostly built on ethereum L2 layers that lets the writings and articles work as tokens so this allows that nft collectible part to be possible they are stored on the rweave layer which is a decentralized and permanently

stored on the blockchain so the writer's work will not get taken down so why is this really important to move self-publishing forward in my opinion the most oh sorry oh in my opinion the most important part of this is ability to build a wallabase community as opposed to the web to equivalent of an email newsletter building a wallabies Community lets the writer engage with it with their community on chain um this is this is wallets are becoming the primary way how everyone communicates interacts and follows each other compared to web 2 where you're merely just maybe liking commenting or reposting someone's articles and writings in web 3 you're able to

participate in ownership patronage and support as well with the wallabase communities opens up a whole new variety of monetization models so as I said before you're able to make your writings principle and you're able to set a price so your supporters can mint your nfts and that or it can create token gated experiences for them whitelist subscribers nft drops Etc lastly I think this is the most refreshing point for me is that nfts don't all have to be images nowadays nfts really are dominated by JPEG files there may be some music files some gifs some videos but they're really mostly images what's really refreshing for me is that long form writings can become

nfts and their intentions are inherently different than creators and supporters that buy image mits when you are when you mint a long-form Content nft you are supporting the author you're not expecting this nft to um to moon or you're not supposed to you're not intended for it make upgrade profit out of it but you're there just purely to sort of support the Creator and I think this is a really important part of nits that I would like to see happen so next we'll look at some on-chain data I think this is pretty interesting and pretty unique to web3 that we're able to see what the ecosystem looks like as I mentioned fourth this is data from mirror.xyz

so this bar chart shows active writers aggregated by month I've defined octave writers by writer's app published at least one article on the platform so with this you can see how healthy the ecosystem is there's a bit of a spike in August 2022 but since then the platform has retained a pretty consistent amount of writers and this is important for creators because you don't want to be writing on a platform that no one is active on you want to write somewhere where there's potentially lots of traffic and eyes on your work next year we have Publications per writer again this is where we can really see how healthy the ecosystem is and you can see writers are able to see where

they fall in in the platform of writers this offers more transparency to how they're doing and how they can improve lastly this one is probably the most interesting to me this is a pie chart of the number of Publications per each paid so this chart shows .001 and 0.01 eth are the most commonly paid price for uh publication thickest writers transparency over their revenue and pricing models this helps dispel the mystery around how to Benchmark your work a lot of times especially for creatives and self-published writers it's very hard to know how to Benchmark how to price your work especially if you don't have the support of a traditional

publishing industry or any kind of advisors mentors or guidance I think also by human nature we tend to be the most self-critical and even self-deprecating of our work and we tend to settle for a lesson we deserve so having this price transparency helps um helps writers to not accept or not price their work tulip uh lastly I really want to drive home these two points about community and freedom of content and wrap up this talk by how web2 self-colleaging companies can adopt these two principles to improve their platform for writers talked about Community quite a bit in this talk but in my opinion it's really hard to succeed in self-publishing if

you cannot sustain and maintain a strong community of supporters currently webto companies don't really help writers to do that webto companies and allow writers to take their audience with them whether they choose to leave the platform or they happen to get kicked off the platform they show you to own their content and take their email subscribers that they work so hard to build with them to wherever they decide to publish next secondly webto companies can improve Integrations so writers and readers can share their articles externally and writers can continue to get increased visibility and credibility to their work um like I talked about in the last three slides where on chain data web 2 platforms can do a way better job to provide writers better access to

analytics on their ecosystem that this will help writers continue to improve their work and tap into their audience lastly for Freedom content I mentioned this briefly in when I was talking about traditional self-publishing that writers are they're incentivized to write content that will be publishable and I think this this makes a lot of self-censorship happen in the industry and it doesn't allow a free-flowing of ideas and self-publishing really happens because it lowers the barrier of entry and it allows writers to put out content that they would like instead like that doesn't um that are publishable so that bypasses the traditional industry I think this

ties in really well with the pillars of web 3 of diversity and inclusion that we should be allowing more content to exist which means there's going to be more diversity of writers and more diversity of ideas honestly thank you all so much for coming thank you for listening um really appreciated it if you would like to talk more any questions I will be at the covalent booth in devtopia so yeah have a wonderful rest of your Eve Denver and thank you so much