Future of self-publishing and web3 by Khea Chang

They couldn't see me from behind, but I was nodding my head at a lot of things. I feel that the book " lot of things. I feel that the book " Crossing the Chasm" is still relevant. It's one of those works that have existed for a long time, but I reread it recently. It's very good.

Next up, we have a discussion about self-publishing and Web 3. Let's give a warm welcome to Kia Chang, API Engineer at Coalent. Thank you. Thank you so much. They are not verifying user information.

Thank you so much. And hello everyone. My name is Kia and I am an API engineer at Coalent. Today I'm going to talk about how Web 3 can improve the way we self-publish online. Why did I choose to talk about this topic?

Because of hackathons. I've seen many proposals that use NFTs to rethink the structure of royalties, ownership, and artistic recognition in the creative field. Especially in music, writing, and the arts. Clearly, this is where we see an obvious use case for Web 3. I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes out of the hackathon at E-Demo this year.

On a more personal level, I have always been someone who really enjoys reading. And as an avid reader, I think you naturally start to wonder how the idea for a story comes out of someone's head, goes onto paper or, I suppose, a Word document these days, and reaches your hands as a published book. Let's briefly review today's agenda. I will discuss the limitations of Web 2 self-publishing platforms and review some innovations of Web 3 platforms. We will look at some chain publishing data from mirror.

xyz, and I will conclude with how Web 2 platforms can adopt some Web 3 principles. To understand the issues and why Web 2 self-publishing is important, I will briefly explain how traditional publishing works. Traditional publishing has literally existed for centuries and centuries. Some well-known names such as Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, or academic publishers like Oxford University Press, are all examples of traditional publishing. It is extremely difficult for a writer to publish in a traditional way writer to publish in a traditional way , especially if you are a first-time writer with no history of book sales.

The process is generally like this book sales. The process is generally like this . You write a book proposal, try to find a literary agent to represent you and sell your proposal to publishers. If you're lucky enough to receive an offer, you'll probably get a fairly small advance, barely enough to live on until you finish your book. Once your book is released, and hopefully does well, you'll probably get around a royalty rate of 7.

5% for paperbacks and 25% on ebook sales. So this is an extremely high barrier to entry with a rather disappointing profit potential. Writers who become household names are truly the exception in the industry. This is why many writers decide to avoid the traditional route and go directly to self-publishing, directly to the online market . Self-publishing, as I said, is when the author avoids the traditional publishing route.

This allows the author to maintain most of the creative control and also most of the profits from their sales. However, they have to absorb all production and publishing costs, such as distribution and marketing of their book. Some of the most successful books that started as self-published are the Peter Rabbit Tales. I'm sure we all read that as children and Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey . If you were a teenager around 2014 or 2015, I'm sure you saw many of those excerpts on Tumblr, Instagram, or social media.

So yes, those are two books that emerged from self-publishing and became popular. They were later acquired by traditional publishers. Due to the high cost and time commitment required for self-publishing, one of the most widely used solutions is Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. These are 2019 figures, but Amazon has 83% of the market share in the publishing space. An overwhelming amount.

I suppose the most popular and successful self-published book on Amazon is The Martian by Andy Weir. I'm sure some of you have heard of him. It was adapted into a film starring Matt Damon. So this is the big downside of publishing on Amazon, in my opinion, is that you're feeding the monolith. You are allowing Amazon to gain an ever-increasing market share in the space.

However, it is also extremely difficult to promote yourself among all the ebooks on Amazon's platform. Today we see a lot of self-publishing in the form of newsletters, blogs, or fiction series on web2 platforms like Substack and Medium. I'm sure everyone is very familiar with this. It is very popular among web 2, web 3, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and opinion leaders. Substack and Medium offer a solution for self-published writers to distribute their writing cheaply and cultivate a community.

However, some of the disadvantages are that writers don't really earn much money on these platforms. Less than 10% of writers on Medium earn more than $100 a month. Another major drawback is that writers do not own their content and cannot take their followers and subscribers with them if they decide to leave the platform, or they may be expelled due to the platform's terms and conditions . So, as a writer on these platforms, you're very much tied to what the platform says you can and can't publish, and they're free to update those terms and conditions whenever they want. So now come the web3 self-publishing dapps.

It is worth noting that the most well-known are mirror.xyz and paragraph.xyz. These are decentralized publishing and writing platforms that permanently store writers' works on the blockchain and help support them by making their writing "mintable". So, how does this work?

A brief summary of their technology stack is that they are mostly built on Ethereum's L2 layers, which allow writings and articles to function as tokens. This makes the NFT collectibles part possible. They are stored in the Arweave layer, which is decentralized and permanently stored on the blockchain permanently stored on the blockchain . Therefore, the writer's work will not be eliminated. So why is this really important for boosting self-publishing?

In my opinion, the most...oh, excuse me. In my opinion, the most important part of this is the ability to build a wallet-based community, as opposed to the web2 equivalent of an email newsletter . Building a wallet-based community allows the writer to interact with their community on the chain. Wallets are becoming the primary way everyone communicates, interacts, and follows each other.

In comparison to web2, where you can simply "like", comment or repost someone's articles and writings . In web3, you are able to participate in ownership, sponsorship, and also in support. With wallet-based communities, this opens up a whole new range of monetization models. As I said before, you can make your writings " you can make your writings " mintable" and set a price so your followers can mint your NFTs, or you can create experiences with exclusive access via tokens, allowed subscriber lists, NFT releases, etc. Finally, I think this is the most refreshing point for me: NFTs don't have to be just images.

Today, NFTs are really dominated by JPEG files. There may be some music files may be some music files , some GIFs, some videos, but it 's mostly images. What 's really refreshing to me is that long-form writing can be turned into NFTs, and their intentions are inherently different from those of creators and followers who buy image NFTs. When you coin a long-form content NFT, you are supporting the author. You don't expect this NFT to, uh, take off, or it's not meant to; it's not intended for you to make a huge profit from it, but you're there purely to support the creator.

And I think this is a very important part of NFTs that I would like to see happen. So now we'll look at some data in the chain. I think this is, uh, quite interesting and quite unique to Web 3, that we can see what the ecosystem is like. As I mentioned before, this is data from mirror.xyz.

So this bar chart shows the number of active writers added per month. I have defined active writers as those who have written and published at least one article on the platform. This allows you to see how healthy the ecosystem is. There was a small spike in August 2022, but since then the platform has maintained a fairly constant number of writers. And this is important for creators because you don't want to write on a platform where nobody is active platform where nobody is active .

You want to write somewhere where there's potentially a lot of traffic and eyes on your work. Below, we have the publications by writer. Again, this is where we can really see how healthy the ecosystem is, and you can see that writers can see where they stand among the other writers on the platform. This provides more transparency about how they are doing and how they can improve. Finally, this is probably the one that interests me the most.

This is a pie chart of the number of posts per ETH paid number of posts per ETH paid . So, this chart shows that 0.01 and 0.1 ETH are the most commonly paid prices for a post. This gives writers transparency about their income and pricing models.

This helps to dispel the mystery about how to evaluate your work. Often, especially for creatives and self-published writers, it is very difficult to know how to value or price your work, especially if you do not have the support of a traditional publishing industry or any kind of advisors, mentors or guidance. I believe that, also due to human nature, we tend to be very self-critical and even undervalue our work, and we tend to settle for less than we deserve. So having this price transparency helps writers not to accept or undervalue their work. Finally, I really want to emphasize these two points about community and content freedom and end this talk with how Web 2.

0 self-publishing companies can adopt these two principles to improve their platform for writers. Well, we talked quite a bit about community in this chat, but in my opinion, it's very difficult to succeed in self-publishing if you can't sustain and maintain a strong community of followers. Currently, Web 2 companies don't really help writers achieve that really help writers achieve that . Web 2 companies can allow writers to take their audience with them. Whether they decide to leave the platform or are kicked off, they can choose to own their content and take their hard-earned email subscribers with them wherever they decide to publish next .

Secondly, Web 2 companies can improve integrations so that writers and readers can share articles externally, and writers can continue to gain greater visibility and credibility for their work. As I mentioned in the last three slides on chain data three slides on chain data , Web 2 platforms can be greatly improved by giving writers better access to analytics within their ecosystem, which will help them improve their work and leverage their audience. Finally, regarding freedom of content, I briefly mentioned when discussing traditional self-publishing that writers are incentivized to write publishable content. And I think this causes a lot of self-censorship in the industry and doesn't allow a free flow of ideas. Self-publishing actually happens because it lowers the barrier to entry and allows writers to publish the content they prefer, rather than what is "publishable," thus bypassing the traditional industry.

I think this ties in very well with the Web 3 pillars of diversity and inclusion, as we should allow for more content, which means more diversity of writers and ideas. Finally, thank you all so much for coming. Thank you for listening all so much for coming. Thank you for listening . I really appreciate it.

If you'd like to talk more or have any questions, I'll be at the Covalent booth at Devtopia. So yes, have a wonderful rest of ETH Denver and thank you very much.