I wonder, wonder, wonder, oh, we're up in the car Tell me, tell me, tell me, we're broke for a long I've got to know the answer, we're somewhere in the car, we're going there
I love you darling baby you know I do
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪#
♪ Just one more chance ♪ ♪ Ooh, I wonder wonder ♪ ♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh, up the block of law ♪ ♪ Baby, baby, baby ♪ ♪ Other than the years, I do ♪ ♪ When it says the wind is good to fall ♪ ♪ I just wonder, next to my heart ♪
Hey, hey, hey, happy Valentine's Day Tuesday and welcome to the right three show. Uh, Maley, can you hear me okay on your side? I definitely can. Oh, nice. You're coming in loud.
clear as well. So yeah, well welcome everyone to the right three show. I can't wait to get into a discussion today and chat a lot about web through writing and nonfiction
and the ebook business because it's definitely an interesting topic for me and for I know a lot of people on our audience so it should be a really good one today. Hope you enjoyed my intro music today, Malene. I try
always to have a fun song but you know what better than Book of Love on Valentine's Day right? Well I love to dance so I was just warming up here. That's awesome that is fantastic very nice and it's it's sort of lake where you are correct
It's 8 p.m. So sort of not not that. Yeah, that's not too bad. We we moved up this show a couple of hours today to to make sure that we can get you fitted in here and appreciate you being flexible with us and and appreciate you being on the on the show today. So, um,
If you want to take a quick second and click that little button on the bottom right that will open up the chat, feel free to like, comment, retweet the space, share this with your friends.
friends. I'm going to go ahead and try to share it myself to some folks and we'll see if we can get some some friends and some smart people in here to chat about all things ebooks and whatnot. So it should be a great space today.
I have as I said, I've got Malene Benson with us today. Malene is quite an accomplished coach and consultant and speaker and she is an expert when it comes to helping sell
published nonfiction books and build online teaching and public speaking businesses. And what I how I came across Malene's work is actually through her book, "Niction Author," which I found and sourced and collected on
and super awesome book. I can't wait to get into it. It was one of those things, Malene, when I was reading it, I was like, "Oh my goodness, there's somebody else on this planet who is thinking about the same stuff as I am." And so, really excited.
to have you here today. So why don't we start by just talking to us a little bit about your background and how you came into Web 3 and sort of how you've come about starting to publish some books on Reedle.
Well, most book coaches have background from, with more like a professional writing experience. My experience is actually within business and innovation. And eight years ago I was the CEO of a self-publishing company in Lima in Peru of
all places so far from Denmark where I am now. And I spent two years there and I learnt the industry inside and out and already at that time I had this feeling that this industry is ancient and I have a background in innovation and disrupting mature industry
So I was wondering what's gonna come next? There are so many things that are not working in this industry there, there are also many many opportunities there, but there are definitely things that are not working as well as could be and this calls for disruption. So when I last year at
social media marketing world in San Diego. Actually a little bit before on a Mike Stelsner's podcast, I heard about Web 3 and I remembered that back in 2000 and I think 2009 or 2010. I did an innovation project that had it to do with something with the second life that's what
We're now here about as metaverse, and also Bitcoin and so forth. For 15 years I heard nothing about it. Now it just started showing up in marketing. That got me curious because I thought that blockchain technology was all about cryptocurrency.
and investing in whether or not the currency rate would go up or down and it was quite simple my view on that. And then I realized this is going to change everything. So there's a reason why we call it Web 3. There was a Web 2 and a Web 1 before it.
It's going to come. It's like a timeline and we are definitely moving towards blockchain and it's impacting all things business, all things marketing and also luckily all things publishing. So I decided that I would spend that confidence
a year ago to talk to all of the speakers that were there. They were all very successful authors. So I spent those days asking them, "What are your plans for taking advantage of Whip3? They knew about NFTs. There was a lot of a part of the conference was about
whip free. So they all knew what it was and they all saw this is going to be big. But nobody had a plan. Nobody had actually fought through. How can you use this as an author? So I decided to go back home and dig more into it and learn more
more about what would be some interesting ways of taking advantage of Web 3 and to get ahead of competition really because that's what this is all about is to build an audience, build closer relationships with your audience and find new, more creative.
more fair ways of publishing books. So yeah, after I've done that, I wrote the entire book in August because I wanted to get it out really, really quickly. Yeah, fantastic. It's been interesting. Wow, that's
quite a learning curve to go from not really having much exposure to Web 3 or crypto all the way into like, hey, making, you know, an entire book. So I'm thoroughly impressed to say the least.
Well, let's start with there's just so many questions that I have and so many topics that I want to dive deeper in and if I can really set the stage in my experience the NFT book Marketplace is growing
it's experimenting, it's expanding. We have lots of of Web 3 book publishers out there and they're doing all kinds of great stuff and it's very interesting to see and I love all of the innovation but the one area that I don't feel like I at least know a lot about or I
see a lot is in this more of this business book side. It mostly what I'm seeing is around fiction. It's fiction and storytelling and again it's really great but one of the things that really struck me about your book and about your expertise is
that you really come out this from a solo pranour standpoint. So can we start with the solo pranour side? You have been working with solo pranours even before Web 3, correct? That's kind of been your jam, is that right? It has, yes. I have the
published a few books myself, but I'm also the editor of more than 30 books, closer to 35 now I think. So I've been in this game being a, and I'm not a publisher because I cherish the rights for the authors.
So I really think no one who is a solo proner who wants to publish a non-fiction book with the purpose of using that book to attracting customers rather than gaining a profit from book sales. If you're in that category, you should own your book. So I'm not a publisher. That's why I call myself
book coach and I've been there for like six years but we know six six years yeah and before that I was a head of the self-publishing company in Lima Peru but when I was there I realized a few things one was that we did not help the author actually create the book
which is the first and biggest problem that many authors have. And also that they are more relevant to maybe what you're asking me. I've discovered that they are really three different segments of authors. There's the professional author who write books
for a living and that's what they do. They have great writing skills and that's what they do every day. They get up in the morning and they write for eight hours and then, oh, however, their schedule is. But that's what they do. They need to be great writers and they need to sell books because that's their income. So their main source of income.
Then we have a second segment that are people who have some, usually a traumatic experience in life, something happened. And they want to write a book about it because they want to help someone, if even one person reads a book and
benefits from that and makes their life easier. They are really okay with it's not becoming a bestseller. They just want to share their story if it can help someone. And also for them, the process of writing is super important because that's the healing part of it.
That's really where they digest what happened and how did I overcome it. So the writing itself is really enough value for them. And then we have entrepreneurs. They don't really care about writing. They are usually quite good writers, but they don't need writing.
skills to publish a nonfiction book. So what do I mean by that? They have highly organized knowledge, so they already communicate everything they know about their subject in public speaking, in online courses, in-person training, seminars, workshops, they are used to convey
They convey their message and to train people in whatever is they are teaching. So pedagogy is really more important than writing skills and marketing because they don't necessarily want their book to get in many people's hands, but they're not expecting to make money from books.
they are selling something else and the book is an authority and a marketing tool. So this is where I connected the dark during social media marketing world that Web 3 is actually a new marketing strategy. So it's also about documentation and a lot of other tech stuff but it's
really about relationships with your readers or users or whatever kind of customers you have. So I saw that it fits very well, it's this specific segment. But what happens in the marketplace that you have seen as well is that many of those who start
thing with a literary NFTs or NFT books, whatever we want to call it, they focus on fiction and they are creating two things, they are creating three things maybe. They are creating a writing platform so they are creating a space for people to actually write. So
that recognizes that there's a process in writing which doesn't really fit the entrepreneur. We want just one to get it out of their head and into a book format so they can hand it over to someone for editing. They want to sell that time to a customer, not spend all that time on creating the book.
shouldn't really be creative in terms of what goes into the book. They have their content already. They need to be creative in their marketing. So this is an unnecessary feature for non-fiction authors, in my opinion. Then all of these new book, online bookstores, they are also an
bookstores, they are also exactly that at bookstore. So their strategy is to get a lot of readers in there so that books can be traded and resold and create and generate royalties for the offers. So it's an and like all in one ecosystem they are looking to get.
Just like Amazon and KDP, they have KDP and they have their bookstore and they are the audience that manage to keep on the platform that's important. And then there's the actual, the third part is obviously to actually publish and mint an NFT book.
But that functionality is really the only thing that nonfiction of the needs. They need their books to be everywhere, not on one platform. And they need them to be among other business books, not among other stories, other fiction books. So we still have
We still have some steps to go in this field. Well, today, I definitely hope that we can take, I love how you broke down those three types of writers. And in my experience, that makes a ton of sense. So I like the idea of focusing today's conversation around that third
root, which is the entrepreneur. And we definitely, yeah, we can sort of say from the beginning, I love this idea that entrepreneurs aren't always necessarily trying to sell the most copies, right? That's not core to what they are doing. What
most entrepreneurs are doing are writing a book to create authority. And so talk a little bit more about how NFT books helps establish authority and helps market the person to as many audiences as possible. And if you want,
You can use your book as an example, right? So Nick, Jen, author, you published on read-alb, but I can also pick it up on Amazon. And so talk a little bit about your thought process and strategy around creating a nonfiction book and publishing it in multiple ways in different places.
Yeah, well I was, I was because this is a, this is really moving very fast in this space right now. So new services are coming up all the time, but I still honestly haven't found the perfect one for nonfiction books. So I'm looking for, I'm still looking for that and
A few things happened on my end as well. I got injured, I had an accident. I got injured and I actually was on the sick leave three months after publishing the book. I'm okay now. But anyways, what I was hoping for was that perfect solution to be available when I was ready to go into an NFC.
project and honestly I haven't found the perfect solution for nonfiction books yet so the strategy for my specific book is actually to use it to test all of the platforms so I'm going to publish a little bit on all of the platforms that I find and share my experience
with that because that's my mission in life. I call myself publishing in rebel. So I go test and do stuff and then I share about it. But if I should give some guidelines about where will be a great strategy for nonfiction books. It depends
on your audience. And in my book Next Gen author, I actually outlined four different types of customers that all audiences can be placed in one of them. We all have a little bit of all four in us, but we usually have a dominant one. So my audience are people
who are just like that that I just mentioned they want to experiment they are eager to try new things they are risk-willing so they will be perfectly fine with this strategy that I have they would love for me to share all of these things because that's how their mindset is but their other audiences will not like
that. So in the back of the book I actually break it down into different strategies for these four different segments. So there's no one five-speed sold. That said, what is different about NFC books for my type of audience, me publishing
an else on NFT book before it's ready, that's valuable to them. But to other segments that would just make no sense. So you got to adapt to your individual audience for your book and for your business as well of course.
should be your customers you are attracting. But what is really interesting is not really if you can create more authority. And if I have my specific segment for those it creates authority to that it is an NFT book because I'm at first
that's why, not because it's an NFT, just because it's new. But for most segments, that's not the case. For most segments, what is more interesting is that when you sell books on Amazon or anywhere else, you get zero customer data. You don't
know who bought your book. So using your book to create a marketing funnel and to create leads for your more profitable services, that's quite difficult. You need to put links in the book or create content outside of the book that you are encouraging the reader to go get on your website
example and then you can start a marketing funnel there but you are losing so much of that customer data in that process because not all will even ever open the book after they board it. Not all will then click on the link and sign up for something and start that process with you but when we are talking
Talking NFT books, you will know which wallet paid for the book and you can then afterwards send more NFTs to that wallet, send additional valuable content to those who bought your book. And the great thing is that because we
can sell the NFT, not only the author can sell NFTs, but also those who purchase the NFT book can then resell it. And the author will get compensated again, get royalties again, which they also don't do on Amazon when they sell books in the
secondary market, but you will still be able to know who is the new wallet that is holding your NFT. So this means that at all points in time, an author will be able to reach everyone who ever bought that NFT. This is a, this
One of the things that's different about Web3, there are no closed silos in which data is kept within Amazon right now. We cannot get access to see who bought our books, even though they have all of the information about who bought our books.
But it's like a close silo in Web 3 everything is transparent. So I can just look up who owns now these NFTs. I can even look you up and see which NFTs do you own and what did you pay for them and who had them before and what did they pay for them. It's really.
It's awesome, it's really great. This is really the big game changer that we get to have customer data and also that there are no middlemen between us and the readers. I agree that the customer
customer data is so important. Never before, and it even goes beyond just knowing who you mentioned before, the fact that we know the what. We can look at wallets and see how much money is in them. We can see what their average price of their purchases were
So if you've got a lot of wallets that have got a lot of your activity, you can really begin to use those data sets to decide, you know, next time you launch a book, you can say, well, you know what, I tried this many editions last time, you know, maybe I'll reduce the editions or maybe I can add more editions or maybe I can add more editions.
at a higher price, we can actually start to make data-based decisions on how we sell and market our books. And we've never been able to do that for, right? >> Exactly. >> No, no, and that's one part of it. And building on that, another interesting thing is that
So very, very, very old paper books that were first editions of something they can be super valuable today. We all know that, but it's not how the book market works today. It's a forgotten discipline that has to do with a book publishing is a paper
first industry. Even though we've had e-books for a long time, now we have also audio books and we have NFT books, we are still, it's a paper first industry. And the profits are generated by keeping printing costs down. How do you do that?
keep volume up. If those books are not sold, so if you work with a publisher and they want to sell 5,000 of your books, they print 5,000, but they're not selling, it is actually becoming a liability for the author in the end. So there's something about that mechanism that we produce
and printing a lot of books that is there's an overproduction of books and so many books each year are destroyed. So this entire mindset about more books being a better business deal, that's not true anymore in Web3.
So in Web 3, a volume strategy might be the best strategy, but it might also be a very, very lucrative strategy and possibly even more if you have a big audience and you don't provide books for everyone and they can resell it and you'll probably say it's an NFC.
tea, these can be resold every time they're traded. The price will go up because there's a bigger demand that there is in a cheap books available. So this is a great strategy if you have a quite strong brand or you have a very loyal audience, this would be a very good
strategy that you don't publish in so many books that everyone can just get one. You want to create a hype around those books. And so one way of doing that is that you have a higher demand than you have available NFT books. And another strategy is that you can use those wallet addresses to add more
value to the NFT holders. There are no longer just readers. There are NFT holders that happens to deliver a book also, a digital book. But it can also include access to your events, voting rights in your community, access to an
online course that's included with the book so maybe at the price of a book is no longer $15 or $20 maybe it's $800 for a per book and maybe they will be traded again and again and each time US and author have programmed because that's what we do we propose
the smart contract behind the NFT to what is the NFT what's going to happen when the NFT is traded what is going to be used for this NFT that's in the smart contract and it's very easy when you publish an NFT book to just put a number how much royalty do you
us and also want to get on this, every time this NFT is sold. And it happens automatically. So I'm leaning into I have so many things. It's all very good. It's all very good. We still have some time here to chat. So, but I thought I'd try to reset the room here for those that might have came
late and a couple of of quick updates but I am speaking with Malene Benson author of the next chin author and we're chatting all about solar pranourorship web 3 ebooks and if NFT books can disrupt the amazon biz book monopoly which I
We've kind of hinted around that question, but maybe we should get to the bottom of that particular question. But I did want to bring up a couple things. One, I put a link to the next gen author, readlebook in the Twitter spaces chat. So check that out.
that out if you haven't collected it, go ahead and collect it now. And as always, if you've got a question for Mainlean, I know I've got plenty of awesome write three writers out there in the audience. And I know they may want to ask you some questions. Go ahead and
And jump on stage here. Let's get your questions asked because it's an interesting discussion. And I want to make sure that everyone gets the chance to ask their questions. So let's take a stab at this idea of Amazon's Biz Book of Noveli. I mean, we already talked a little bit about
some of the things that NFT books can offer that Amazon cannot. But I suppose we should probably spend a few minutes and talk about just how far the Web 3 NFT book marketplace has to go, right? Because in order to truly disrupt Amazon,
Our onboarding has to be better, our processes have to be better. As you mentioned before, there's not really a place that's perfect for NFT e-books, so to speak. So, you know, can the Web3 NFT book disrupt Amazon and what needs to happen in order for that to take place?
Well, usually the biggest, most successful and oldest companies are not the first to innovate. So whether or not Amazon will or will not be a FF front.
runner in terms of offering to mint the offers to mint NFT books. That's still an open question. Amazon is active in NFT space, but it's not for the it's not like a book minting process yet, but there are other very
big book distributors who are very active. So Amazon is a self-publishing platform and it's also a bookstore but then not really book distributors. So book distributors like Ingram Group and also in Europe it's book
via the German company that covers most of the book distribution in Europe as far as I know, they are both deep into the space, but their customers and their core business are bigger traditional publishers. So in-gram is a little bit more, they have a self-publishing service as well.
more leaning towards independent office as well, but both of them are still protecting their core revenue streams. Of course, they are. That's why bigger, most successful old businesses are not usually the first to innovate because
They have an existing business to protect while building the income streams of tomorrow. That's not an easy task. But they are actually the ones who are building services that look more like what independent authors need.
So what independent authors need is a solution that will help them mint the book but also to distribute that NFT into multiple NFTs marketplaces and that thing is not really there yet, but I think those will be
because they they seem more eager to invest in this area than Amazon does. So they might actually gain some business from Amazon on this because we really don't need a bookstore. We just need somewhere to discover this book. So whether they
can compete with Amazon that only time can sell. Apart from those book distributors, the main drivers of this change are smaller tech companies, startups and often haven't defunded. But they are not from the
the publishing industry. They're seen an opportunity in the market and they're running with that and they're doing very well, but mostly as we spoke about already within fiction and also writing stories. What are some of the tools that you think the business book NFT?
And I'll throw one out right off the bat. I think that being able to air drop to your wallet should be super easy. I think that is the terminology I use a lot is reward and engage.
our audiences. So it's like if someone buys your book, you should be able to almost immediately air drop, create, send, do lots of different ways to use air drops. And it seems like all the air dropping that I am trying to do is like this quagmire of smart
contracts and just craziness. So that is one thing that I've given that feedback to read all I've given that feedback to some other platforms to say, you know, if you can, if you can streamline the idea of rewarding and air dropping and engaging those wallets and just making that super easy for us as authors, I think that would
be a really value add to a platform on a self publishing platform. What other tools or advice, or if you're giving advice to one of these Web 3 NFT platforms, what are some of the things that you'd like to see created or innovated?
Well, that you just mentioned and building on that, that's really also about that they put the reader authorship, authorship, relationship at the center of everything they do. But without forcing
me to stay on their platform doing it. So I'm not sure what the solution is yet. But if we talk about Amazon, for example, I would love us an author that I can pick one place and then I can have it as a hard back, have it as a paperback. I can publish my ebook and I can
I've probably my audiobook-wise, I don't know, a different platform. That's just weird. It's just, it's their tech problems. But from a user perspective, it doesn't make sense. It's a completely different platform than the other versions, especially that E-book and audio is not. I could understand if it was paper and digital.
but it's not. So, so, so, integrating everything in one place and then make it easy as you mentioned to, to continue the process with that, with the readers and, and every able to air drop easily and get an analytics across all of these
formats as well. But what I see some are trying to do is then to offer, they have seen this need. So they are, they are, I'm talking specifically those who are working with NFT books now, they have seen this need to work with the audience
But then they create solutions that keep them on the publishing platform. But I want them to go to my website and buy other services if I'm a solopreneur. So that's where solopreneur differs from what everybody else needs. We really need them to come to our website and buy whatever it is we're making money on.
So instead of what summer offering a specific number of landing pages I can create with my NFT, but I don't want to create my landing pages on someone else's platform. I want them to be able to integrate to my landing pages. So creating
I'm not that techy, so whether it's APIs or widgets or whatever it is, they just need to make it very easy for me to integrate. And very much that takeaways me really into the overall change that needs to happen is they need to take the take out of it.
So that it's not the technology has been developing since 82. It's not new. This is not new. Blockchain technology has been built on since the 80s. This is not new. But it's surfacing now because there are so many developers who see the need to make it none.
technical so that everyone can look at this from a business perspective and understand it out of a business perspective and not from a take standpoint. Probably many of these names will change, fungible who invented that word, nobody knows what it means.
So let's call it something more simple maybe and take the take out a bit so it's more user friendly. That's the biggie here. It needs to be user friendly and we don't need to understand the tech behind it. I guess you and me and everyone who's listening in here are little
bit interested in the tech part as well maybe otherwise I suppose we were not here but most people are not. They don't want to know how the internet works either. They don't need to know how the blockchain or the minting or everything else works. They just need to learn that they need a wallet and it should be
very easy just to buy those services that are mending processes, to air drop, all of these things should just be so easy that they don't need to feel it's a learning curve. That's what needs to change. How important is having
having the option on the minting site to offer like a physical book as well. Do you think in the future that that's you know I hate to use this term it makes me cringe when I think about it but this digital idea of that we have this
You know, we can have an NFT, but then plot, you know, have a physical side as well should you know ebook author self published authors that are thinking about NFT books should they also give a an ebook or a physical book option, do you think? Yes
I definitely think for now and for a long time to come, I think there will always in any target group for their business, there will be people who prefer an audiobook, there will be people who prefer an e-book, there will be people who prefer an
NFT, there will be people who prefer Harpec. So those preferences, they are not consistent with any other segmentation model. It's just a preference for how we consume content and we do it. It's really more
attached to maybe some maybe some values sometimes I don't know but more to it's quite often a very practical decision if I travel a lot I read a lot of e-books if I run a lot I listen to audio books if we we we
have different consumption patterns when it comes to books and if we don't have as many formats as possible, we're just missing out of a part of our target group from that alone and that's just a pity and it's not more difficult to publish in all of the formats. It's very easy to publish
publish all of the formats. The only thing that really requires something extra is the audio book. It doesn't really require anything extra to publish an NFT book. It's very, very easy. It's uploading your ebook and telling how much money you want in secondary sales. That's about it.
It's not difficult. So it doesn't really require, there's no investment reason for why you should not offer all of these options. Great. We've got Moongirl up on stage and I'll open that up to you in
just a second, but just a reminder, if you've got a question from Alene, come on up, ask away the link to her NFT book, Next Gen author is in the comment section. And if you're listening to this on the podcast, I'll put it in the show notes as well. So Moongirl, go ahead
What's your question for Malene? Hey, good morning. How's everybody doing? You know, I just wanted to, to, I guess, touch a little bit upon you were talking about the secondary market. I think, honestly, that's that's one of the things that makes
the disruption, like in and of itself, a strong positive for authors. The fact that you decide, okay, you know, I want royalties on this book and here's the percentage that I'm after and I'm going to publish this many books. If it does well and everybody
snaps up a copy, you know, now that book becomes pretty successful, I would say, and the fact that you can get endless returns on the resale of it is something that, you know, you don't see with Amazon currently, I could buy your book, Greg, and
read it when I'm done. I listed on Amazon and it goes to somebody else and you don't see a dime of that. So I think just so that people are more aware of that model, if you could maybe maybe talk a little bit about that and what that means for authors, that would be awesome.
There was definitely. Yeah, that's a biggie. So you can say that for physical books, many books or nine bookstores at least are today offering that you can sell your book when you have read it.
100% right that Amazon will get their share of that and the person who's selling it will get their share of that but the author will get nothing. So that's one kind of unfairness that's happening here. With an NFT you can put a percentage and you will get that
percentage every time the book is sold for in perpetuity. Of course you need to think about that there needs to be some kind of motivation for people to actually sell it. So you need to make a choice when you're deciding your strategy is my overall the first
The first decision really is, am I going to apply, hold or sell strategy to my NFT book project? Do I want to create a few NFTs and make those more valuable and try to drive the value up?
or do I want to create enough for everyone? And that very much depends on what your business strategy is. So for an entrepreneur who are looking to get it into the hands of as many people as possible, it might be an interesting strategy to create a lot of NFTs
and hold that place in people's wallet. So every time they do something with their wallet or they visit there, whatever is in their wallet, they will see you in there. So you might want to do that because you want to stay present in people's mind and be everywhere. That might be one strategy, but
but you might also not want that strategy and you want the reselling royalties instead and you want to drive the value up and create a make it I think for an authority strategy both could work really but that's a first decision you need
to make. What's going to be my strategy here? Am I going to create a few or many? And remember that a few might be a more lucrative strategy than many. So yeah. And a couple of just a couple of things on that, Malene. I mean, one one thing that is important and and I was thinking the same
thing, but Prism just put this in the chat. Royalty's are not guaranteed and that's especially true in the sense that you mentioned before about separating the reader and the publisher and the platform and making it agnostic in the sense of not
forcing people to stay on a platform, which I completely get because that's a very web 3 like idea. But, you know, if you're selling on a platform and you're reselling on the platform and that platform offers royalties, then there's a reason to stay kind of in that platform ecosystem, right?
because if your book is being sold on a platform that you're not even aware of, you may not have royalties set up on that platform because basically ultimately royalties cannot be built in, at least not in our right now, into smart contracts, right? So it has to be at the platform level.
that those royalties exist. So that was one just idea or topic. And then the other thing that I think is interesting that I think we can utilize NFT books with is this idea around free. So there's something that happens in Web 2 all the time. You see it on Twitter a lot. Hey, this
this weekend I created this ebook. I created this notion template. Comment on my thread and I'll give it to you for free. And it gets back to your idea at the beginning, which is for a lot of solo per newers, books aren't really about making money. It's more about expanding your market, expanding
your audience. It's about collecting email addresses or in this case it might be about collecting wallet addresses. And so offering something for free is a way for you to gather a lot of wallets or a lot of value, get into a lot of audiences and then if that book ends up taking
off or you end up getting royalties down the road if it's being resold on a platform that's good. But you know, this idea of free can really work if you're a solopreneur. That might not work so much in the fiction world, but in the solopreneur world going with a free option might make a lot of sense. Is that fair?
Yeah, I think it is. I think it is. I think it's super important to realize that there are no right or wrong strategy here. There's just a consistent strategy. So like if thinking it through, creating NFTs and NFT books, that's the easy part, the difficult part
is making your business decisions around your book. Which strategy are you going to follow? And not focus so much on the actual publication. By the way, that happens with paper books as well. That authors tend to focus so much about writing.
and about publishing. But what's interesting is what happens after. And I think that Web 3 kind of forces us to think more about that overall strategy. What's my long-term strategy going to be? But you can publish on a modern
one platform. So yes, you should keep your book and your availability and your books for sale on that platform, but you can just create more on another platform. So it's more an overall consideration, how many do I want to be available out there? And what are they going to represent? Are they going to just
be a book. So when I say an NFT book, I mean just a book. But it could be an offer selling NFTs as part of the bigger project, for example. This is a mission to revolutionize the publishing industry. So if I'm on that mission, I might
want to create a completely different NFT project. Maybe I even would want to create a DAO or something. I'm not ready for that at all and there are many, many issues there also legally right now. But still, there are some bigger business decisions than just the book in this.
Very true. Very true. Well, we're running up against the hour here. I want to make sure if you do have a question for Meleane, come on up and let's get those in before we've got to let Meleane go and enjoy the rest of our evening.
appreciate your time today. It's been an awesome discussion. Once again, I put a link to NextGen author. Go ahead and collect that. You know, one of the things that we have to do as the right three community, I think, is we need
to be the ones out there testing these platforms. I am all about trying to offer books or literary entities at low cost so that people can go out and collect them, try the platforms, go out
there and try these things if we aren't going to be the ones who are out here trying to make these platforms better than who else will. So that's my call to action for everybody in the audience today and the right-three community is to go out, be some of these first users
to see how these platforms work and then give these authors and give these platforms the feedback that they need to understand how all of this works. Moongirl, go ahead and ask your question. It looks like Prism wants to hop up and ask a question as to. So go ahead Moongirl.
You were talking a little bit about some strategies and whatnot that in terms of publishing. And I'm just curious, what are some strategies that you've tried that have worked and what are some ones that maybe didn't work so well?
Do you mean within NFTs? Yes, of course This is so new that I couldn't even publish it as an NFT when the book came out in August or in September it came out in September I couldn't even publish it as an NFT at that point so it's only been a few months since I decided okay
I'm going to have to use one of those fiction platforms then. So I haven't really tested a lot of strategies. What the book does is outline what is it that the opportunities are, but I have no evidence to tell you what works and what doesn't work. I think from that we really need to learn
from NFG projects in general. So the book addresses, for example, why do people buy NFTs? And one could be that they are thinking about it as an investment, or they might be collectors. Those are very different strategies and both could apply to book publishing as well.
And there are many other mentioned in the book as well. So I cannot say that there's this strategy that really works. If you want to launch it as a bigger project, you should have an audience or very solid partnerships first. That's one thing that I can mention at least.
But I think that you might also just have an audience who loves everything you do and they will probably think this is just a fun project to be part of. And they might even buy your book just because they trust you or
already and they know that okay it sounds like this is something I'm going to have to learn so I'm going to learn it with her. So then we are at weird time in this right now that we are trying to onboard so many people to get
into the web free space. That's a task in itself. And for if your audience is not at all there yet, you're going to have to make that part of your strategy too. So I think that what we can do right now is mostly also learn experiment and learn.
What works and what doesn't learn in general for book publishing I can say there is one strategy that always works and one that never works and The one that never works is unfortunately what many offers to and that is not doing any marketing
But when you have a solid marketing plan, it doesn't really matter how that plan looks like or how it unfolds. It's a matter of being consistent and doing a lot. When you do a lot, you will sell a lot. And my hypothesis is this is going
to be the same with NFTs. That's what we'll hear from any NFTs project at least. So there's not going to be any difference there. It's really, there are many marketing strategies that will work for anything. There's no right or wrong here. It's more that you have a solid strategy and that you are
that you consider it a marathon, not a book launch, but a marathon. Yeah, and I would just add, boom, girl, that just to double down, um, Malene's comments. I think it's all about, you know, building a community and then creating the ebook that
fits perfectly into the community. And I posted an example of this in the chat. There's a Twitter account called Simon Art Online. There's a lot around painting and NFT artists, but Simon Art
I don't know if it's a gal or guy, but they have 16 years in cyber security and so they've created these MFT security guide books and the first one had like 300 items and sold out at like 0.7 East.
So clearly this person had an audience of artists, NFT artist who needed cyber security and she created a guide and boom, it's like a $20,000 book and I notice actually that there's now a second volume that's been created
which getting back to the coolness around Ed of T-books is that she sold out 300, the resale value is super high, she's getting royalties off of OpenC and O by the way it's time for an update so instead of going to the Amazon Kindle and just updating it she gets to do a completely new
ebook. So the key there though, right, is that she found her audience and then created an ebook that fit that that solution. And so I kind of think that's a great model that we could see going forward. Prism, what question do you have today?
Hey Greg, hi everybody. Yeah, thanks for the space. I love this topic. This is one of my favorite topics and wow. So I did want to say thank you for doing that first of all. And then my question, I'll have a few questions, but I think the one that's pertinent right now is
I think we're talking about distribution of audiobooks. I wasn't sure if I missed it. I mean, it came in a little bit late. If we talked about that or what you thought about it, I know I've been working with Alexa skills and music and I know that books, audiobooks, with NFK,
is possibility, but I was wondering if somebody is looking at doing that or yeah, so that was my question. Yeah, well that is a digital book format. So anything digital is easy to implement with NFTs and
I think that most of those who offer something within FT books, they also offer that they can be an audiobook. So that's my perception, that's the case. The big difference between the platforms is really apart from what we
talked about with if it's for fiction or nonfiction, if it's for writing or just publishing, but a big difference really is and that's one of the reasons why I didn't publish it back in September that no service was available where they would actually protect my digital
book, whether that was an ebook or an audio book, they were not protecting the file, it became downloadable. And some online bookstores do that for ebooks also. On Amazon, you will have to read the book on Kindle or another ereader, if it's another online bookstore.
But, but they're also online bookstores that would actually email the file or make it downloadable to the person buying the book and I didn't want that for my book. Not yet at least I might use that as a strategy actually if I want to reach as many people as possible but right now I don't
want to make that decision. So that's one of the reasons I didn't publish. But on Reel they are actually protecting your file. So what people get access to is to read it on desktop and it will be on apps real soon if they are not already there. I'm not sure they are but but they are definitely through
and eReader. How they are then going to present audio books, actually I don't know that on readle, but I have asked readle and they have told me that that's a viable format, but I don't know how you actually get access to listen to
with that that's for the reader also it sounds in not the case but it's so I'm not sure about it. Prism sounds like you've got another question let's make if you can make it quick so that we can get Raven P up here and then we also don't take up too much of Malene's time since where we are past the hour here so go ahead
real quick. Yeah, I just wanted to say thank you for that and yeah, definitely check out my profile because I've been doing some work with Alexa and books and also working on making it work in polygons so it may be compatible with what you're doing with your current book. That's all I want to say. Yeah, we can have a separate talk on that maybe.
Right three networking my favorite kind of networking fantastic Raven P. What do you got? Hey, I just have like one question cuz uh for a molean it like what kind of book are you talking about like sort of like an Ft book or what kind of is it like I'm actually you know going like more
moving around spaces. I actually found one of the mean house I mean you can take one of my PFE. I'm not a foleted with them. I don't know anybody. But they are like I think a couple of them are I think punk holders, scripted punk holders and they actually did it and they launched it but they're supposed to you know
sell 4400 but somehow I think caused like the ordinal hype to call their hype away and they even did like the hotline kind of stuff like 1-800 how light you can call and maybe win I win like a couple times and also like I think
They only end up selling so low they had to resize their collections to I don't know if I remember like 700 something from 4400 so it's like you can actually go to open sea and then you go you sort of like a comic book for the kids like
They are targeting like kinds like worth three kinds that's what they are calling and there's like bunch of stories and there's like different triads, strategies, different stories. You can actually go and check it out really if you want to but I'm just staying on more books so if you can tell me more about you let's see what's going on.
Yeah, I'm not sure what your question was. Can you repeat your question? Oh, yeah, my question is like, you know, the one I just talked about is the comic sort of like bedtime story for the kids for parents and kids both What kind of book you are trying to You know publish or bring it
to the NFT world. Well, my specific focus in my business are nonfiction authors who are publishing books about the subject that they teach or they talk about in public speaking. So they're nonfiction books, but it can be
any kind of book. And one of the things that I touched upon in my book next year and author is also that we not only have to reimagine what an author and readership is, but also what a book is, because we're not taking advantage of the digital format. If you think about it,
how long has an ebook looked like what it does right now and it's quite often just a design-wise boring version of the printbook. So why is that when we can create interactive ebooks with videos on audio and all kinds of things integrated? So I think this will
actually also it will put more focus on digital formats and when we do that and we stop having this paper first industry approach then we will also see different book formats becoming available and be more creative in terms of what could a book look like
what is a book? When you look up what a book is, it actually says something about preserving knowledge. So it's a static format, forever in printing. It's not thought of as an interactive piece of content that's kind of alive and updated and
that can have a lot of attachments to it as a normal customer relationship would. So I think all of these things are going to develop the product side of the industry as well. One of the interesting things I'm actually familiar with the
house project and we're seeing this on book I owe as well and it is something that I think NFT books has to deal with and that is if you do a run of a thousand books and no matter what the price is, because of the
the resale ability of these books. If they don't sell out, next thing you know, the second area is on this go super low. And then it really gets difficult to sell the rest of your run because people can just go out and buy and sell it for
half or a third of whatever you thought it was. So I guess that's something to think about. We were talking a little bit about that before, right? Our strategies around how many additions and the cost, you know, but for the most part, I think it's better to err on the side of smaller and less, right? Because
If you get stuck putting out a thousand and you sell 200 and people are buying and selling these things for 20 bucks on the open market, you're never going to sell out. No, I think you should definitely publish less than the audience that you expect to be interested in.
that's a strategy that I have chosen for now. I've only put out very few also because I want to put out very few on the next 15 services that are becoming available that will not share my file. But for my project I haven't really seen any idea
idea in publishing a lot. I don't see the value on that. I prefer having fewer and making it more exclusive and building that value of it. If I then publish more later, I might do that. I might even just drop the next one to those who already hold us, make them
have a special status that you have one of the original NFTs. So there are many, many strategies to apply and I prefer not launching a bigger number. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, listen, I know we've gone over here of my hour a lot and thank you so much.
for being here today. Again, I put a link to Maelene's book in the chat. It'll also be in the show notes for those that'll be listening back on the podcast. I want to thank everyone for being here today. Thanks for being in the audience today. Thanks for coming up for your questions. And Maelene, thank you so much. Where can we find
you your work and I'll give you the last word on the right free show today. Well thank you so much for hosting this is just been excellent so you can find me at LinkedIn I'm Malena Benson on LinkedIn also here on Twitter of course I'm also
TikTok, but perhaps more interestingly I am on Goosebump.pop and it's not plural, it's singular and this is of course because this is that exciting. So Goosebump.pop, there you will find everything about me, there's also there an opportunity
to join a free membership inside Goosebumps.world and stay updated on my findings in this. So that's a good place to stay updated. Thank you so much. I was messing around on Goosebumps earlier today. It's quite a website. It's a fantastic site that you've built
there so I highly recommend that all. So put that in the show notes as well. Manline, thank you so much to the right three family. Go enjoy the rest of your Valentine's Day and let's continue to build and write Web 3 together. Enjoy the day. Thanks y'all. Thank you.