Because that's what you're worth

Experiment and find the right price - entry 11 in this onchain poet's travelogue

What is your work worth? If you decide to self-publish, this is a question you need to ask yourself. Also if you do that self-publishing onchain by minting your poetry (or other art) as NFT. What is your work worth, or, in other words: what is the price tag I should put on my art? If you self-publish a book on, for example, Amazon, this is an important question to ask. And a difficult one. On the one hand there is the complicated question of how much value you want to assign to your labour, talent, time and, you. On the other hand: what is 'the market' willing to pay. Publishing houses have marketing departments for this, and have a great understanding of this balance. But it's a lot of work, if you have to do it yourself.

Minting your poetry as an NFT, however, gives you not just many price-point options, but also many ways to experiment and find the price that's right for you. And as Web3 is an evolving landscape, more and more options are added regularly. In this post, we explore some of the options to find out what your work is worth.

Fine art onchain

Have you ever walked into an art gallery to look at poetry? I have, and it was a very intriguing experience. Also because all the pieces could be purchased as NFTs, which would give you the digital and the physical version. There were amazing pieces on display, and the price tags were a reflection of the category of fine art. To acquire a piece, you would have to spend hundreds, and is some case thousands, of Tezos, which had a near-equivalence to the Euro at the time. Exceptional? Not really. This year, Sasha Stiles sold a poem at auction with Gucci for thousands of Euro worth of Ether, and Ana Maria Caballero sold a poem inscribed on a Bitcoin for even more.

So, it happens. But in all honesty: poets like Sasha and Ana are the top of the pyramid. Their work is recognised as being of the fine art category by experts, museums, collectors and... other poets. But, this is not the norm for most of us. If you have a history in fine art, and have an existing collector's base that is willing to move with you onchain, you might be able to enter this part of the market. If not, it will be hard work.

This top of the pyramid is the domain of those who mint their NFTs on Ethereum Mainnet and maybe Bitcoin. Exceptionally, pieces of this caliber can be found on Tezos and Solana.

Treasures in the sand

Let's go from the top, all the way down to the bottom. Don't get me wrong: treasures are hiding buried in the sands. This is the place where you can collect an edition of a beautiful piece for the cost of about 3 sips of your latte. Or a 1/1 work for the price of a Bic Mac Menu. Not even the large version. This is where most of us stepped in, and where many of us stayed. This is where I play. Not only because I'm a bottom-of-the-pyramid kind of guy, but also because I believe that art should be available to everybody. Or, to be more precise: because I want collecting my art to be attainable to everybody. There are challenges, here, though. And we were hit hard by them in the last 2 years when the market for onchain art was on life support. The struggle is on one hand a catch-22: if you become known for low-priced art, people find it hard to move upward on the pyramid. It does happen, but that, too, is hard work. The other part of the struggle is that you need to move a lot of pieces to earn an income.

Airmiles for minters

On the upside, the communities around the different platforms for this are quite strong. People tend to promote the work of their friends, seek collaborations to both grow and so on. It's one of the reasons I started the Onchain Poetry Digest, listing new onchain poetry every two weeks. These communities can be a bit siloed, but that's more a semi-natural process than a drive for exclusivity. You will be welcome in most places.

This part of the pyramid mostly lives on Tezos, and increasingly on Ethereum L2s such as Base and Zora, but also on Polygon. The key factor here is the very low gas prices for transactions. Tezos has a strong community, that has been building for a long time, since before the previous top in the crypto cycle.

On the Ethereum L2 side, Zora has made a groundbreaking move last year, by introducing their protocol rewards, which you could call the Airmiles for minters. If you collect a Zora NFT, you have to pay a transaction fee of 0.000777 ETH (~ € 1.80). From this fee, if the mint is free other that the fee, Zora will give 0.000333 to the creator of the piece. I have heard of artists who are paying their rent from this income. You still need to work hard for that, but this may very well be your market.

Not only collectors

On top of low prices and protocol rewards, especially around Ethereum L2s there's a lot of Public Good funding going on, part of which is dedicated to the arts. Retroactive funding rounds, matched funding rounds and competitions, are all interesting opportunities for artists in this part of the pyramid. Maybe you have little chance to win the grand prize, but don't let that hold you back. First of all, some of these funding  opportunities are not structured as competition. I participated in a match fund round, in which eligible people could vote for your project by donating ETH to it. The organisers divided the fund at the end in the ratio of the amounts already received. So, everybody is a winner in that one. Even the rounds that are structured like a competition with one, two or three winners are interesting to participate in: you are putting your work in front of people who have an interest in doing good with their ETH, including supporting the arts. So even if you don't win, you might find some new collectors.

Finally, and this is especially true for platforms such as the (sufficiently decentralised) social network protocol Farcaster, and to a degree for Web3 newsletter platform Paragraph, there is the micro-payments income stream, AKA the tip jar. If you have a newsletter on Paragraph or an account on Lens, people can support you by collecting an issue of your newsletter, or a post on Lens. On Farcaster, you can use the native token (which has no direct monetary value, but with which you can pay for your yearly fees) to tip creators. Or you can use $DEGEN, which at the time I am writing this give every user on the platform a daily allowance to tip people who create great content. Paragraph has a collect button. Sure, there are already micropayments available in Web2. I have a tip jar on Buy Me a Coffee. But with all love for these: how many steps does it take to buy someone a coffee? Compare that to replying to a message on Farcaster with the text 1000 $DEGEN to tips somebody what is roughly € 2.5. Or click a 'like' button that sends 10 Warps to a caster. Tipping has become much easier, and that shows.

Finding middle ground

Now that we have looked at the top and the bottom of the pyramid, we can have a short look at the middle part, too. As a rule of thumb, these are the pieces you can collect between 0.1 and 0.5 ETH, or the equivalent thereof. I find this a complex part of the pyramid, because it's on the edge of mass-market and fine art. Where I must emphasize that these terms are only used to compare it to the traditional art world. From where I stand, all onchain poetry is fine art.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the middle of the pyramid. Most of the pieces here are 1-of-1s (1/1). So, unique pieces. Sometimes there are limited editions, too. But with low supply. This is very much the territory of artists who were here during the last bull market. There were many collectors then who were willing to and could afford, the prices asked in this category. In the last 2 years, it was much harder to sell in this part of the market, but there were still some great works collected. Art in this segment can be typically found on Ethereum Mainnet on market places such as Foundation. Solana and Tezos also play a prominent role. And the generative art markets such as fx(hash). You can imagine that selling in this segment is an important income stream for artists. Selling 2 or 3 pieces in this segment can already generate a reasonable monthly income. With the eyes on a next bull market coming up, this might be a great segment to explore.

Building in public

Now, whichever part of the pyramid you want to aim at, please know that your work, your art, deserves to be collected. No matter what price you set. The biggest challenge you face is to find your collector base and where and how they are most likely to mint your creations. Maybe that's at the top of the pyramid, maybe at the bottom, and maybe it's a combination. Whatever you do, remember that Web3 is a relatively new phenomenon. The idea of always being in beta that the open innovation movement claimed is very convincingly adopted by the world of Web3. That's how you can interpret the 'building in public' mantra. We are all  experimenting with how we can make it work best for us. There's a huge willingness to embrace experimentation. Don't be afraid to experiment with platforms, edition sizes and price points for your work. If a certain part of the pyramid does not yield the results you're looking for, try something different. Talk to artists, ask for feedback. Always experiment and find out what works best for you.

Now, ask me anything in the comments, if you're a paid subscriber. I'm also explaining five terms you should know behind the paywall.