On the more traditional side, Butler turns his novels into visually striking GIFs. 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. Several self-published novels like this, attempting to cash in on the NFT trend, claim to be “the first NFT novel.”īut this isn’t the way most writers are working with NFTs. 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.
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. It can be anything digital-a trading card, a newspaper article, or even a novel. Now, Decade sits in null_radix’s digital wallet next to a picture of a forest and a pair of digital socks.īut an NFT doesn’t have to be a meme or a piece of visual art. The buyer, who goes by the pseudonym null_radix, bought Decade because he was “curious what was inside.” When he read it, Null_radix didn’t understand Decade, but he still has no plans to resell. Said Butler, the sale was “like a bolt of lightning to his brain.” 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.
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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.
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. 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. 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.
Blake Butler had given up on publishing Decade.
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