How I Sold A Poem for $500
Even though there are many ways to make money online, I must say that writing is one of the best ways to do it. I have no idea how people could make a lot of money online by clicking on ads, watching videos, and filling out surveys for hours. I’ve tried all of them until I finally told myself, “I can’t do this anymore.”
So, as any sane person would, I tried to look for other alternatives. I knew that writing articles could help you make money (a la journalists), but I don’t enjoy doing research unless I’m passionate about the subject. Speaking of passion, I am passionate about poetry — I graduated college as an English major, and long fantasized about writing poems in a little cottage with my wife in the countryside.
That being said, it’s challenging to break into poetry without financial stability or sponsors. So how did I, as an ‘unknown’, sell my poem for almost $500 USD?
Long story short, I found out about a poetry NFT platform called ‘In Writing’ where users can sell their writing (not just poems, but also articles, short stories, books, etc.!) as NFTs!
What is In Writing?
In Writing is a text NFT marketplace that allows lesser known (as well as more established, but I don’t have personal experience with that) writers to sell their work and get discovered. I minted my writing as an NFT on In Writing and within a week, I had over 20,000 views on my poem. In Writing is a great platform for unknown writers to get their work seen by a large audience.
The reason for the high number of views was due to the fact that the poem was published on In Writing, a website that is dedicated to showcasing new and up-and-coming talent and exposing their work to NFT and cryptocurrency investors. The site features a wide variety of text-based content, including articles, poems, and short stories. Thousands of people visit In Writing every day to find new text NFTs to invest in.
Another reason I chose In Writing as opposed to other text NFT platforms such as OpenSea or textarea was because In Writing already has an established audience of readers, writers, and buyers — as I mentioned earlier, thousands of users are browsing on the daily — and also because there are no exorbitant ‘startup’/onboarding fees or processes. OpenSea wanted over $100 USD in crypto just to open an account and list NFTs with them, whereas In Writing lets you experiment with a free NFT mint and with subsequent NFT mints costing less than $1 USD per (around 80 cents at the time of writing).
Finally, I liked In Writing because it seemed like they were really writer-oriented. Again, as opposed to OpenSea, where ‘creator fees’ are set by OpenSea and have been complained about as being not transparent and arbitrary, In Writing has a built in royalty fee in its core ‘smart contract’ (the code that powers the platform). That means that I made $100 when I sold the poem for 99 MATIC, but was able to make another $100 (20% of the total payment) when the poem was re-sold for 499 MATIC. The website says that they’re doing this to ‘ensure sustainability within the text NFT ecosystem for writers and buyers’, and I can definitely see that trick keeping me sustained, haha.
There were also really great tutorials (e.g. see the ‘how to mint’ tab below) on how to mint on In Writing on the site itself, which I really appreciated since I’ve found entering the Web3 space to be relatively difficult. Personally, I was able to set up my Metamask wallet (cryptocurrency wallet) and mint using their free functionality in around 2 minutes, for reference.
It’s not just me who has found great success on the platform — I’m constantly seeing poems and quotes being sold for hundreds of dollars, and I’m excited to see that Web3 for writers is finally catching up to the boom that artists got to experience in 2021. My one caveat is that I’m also seeing pieces not be sold, so it’s not entirely similar to the art NFT boom where it seemed like every collection, no matter the quality, was getting bought at exorbitant prices.
As an unknown writer, getting 20,000 views on my first poem in a week was an incredible feeling. I was ecstatic and motivated to keep writing. I believe that if you put your heart into your work and share it with the world, you will be rewarded. My poem got tens of thousands of views within a week, and I am so grateful to everyone who took the time to read it. I was skeptical about NFTs before this, but after trying them out, I do genuinely believe NFTs and digital assets have the potential to be the future of not only collectibles, but also marketing, communication, and publishing.
PS: I mentioned this already, but In Writing is currently having a promotion where the first NFT is completely free (no credit card, login, or strings attached) — I don’t know when it will end, but it’s a great way for writers to get into book and poem NFTs!
