Literary journals, sadly, are not instant money-makers. No one gets rich off publishing niche literary content. The only failsafe way to pull in cash is to charge for submissions. But—and no one talks about this enough—this approach is essentially a scam from the perspective of writers.
Aside from changing the culture so people regularly buy literary journals in place of their Netflix subscription, isn’t there some other way to fund literary journals?
There are bake sales, I suppose. And car washes. Also, there’s this new thing: selling NFTs.
The literary world is cautiously figuring out how to participate in the NFT boom. For example, according to The Debrief, some authors are now publishing their books as NFTs. One author, for example, sold an NFT book that he hadn’t been able to get published for 5 ETH (which currently has a value of $15K). Not bad!
It remains to be seen whether NFTs will have a lasting impact on the literary space. With a quick glance at an NFT marketplaces, you can find some books out there—but they don’t exactly seem to be hot commodities. We don’t seem to have a Beeple of books yet, let alone a thriving market for NFT literature.
But still! It’s a fascinating idea: selling literature as tokens. Also, it would be beneficial to the literary ecosystem if literary journals could fund their operations by selling NFTs. Journals don’t just publish stories and poems, after all; they also create a ton of peripheral content. Jokes Review, for example, publishes around 20 works of literature in each issue, and for each work we create an original piece of art. Why not create NFTs based on that artwork?
In fact, we’re giving this a try. Our very first NFT, based on the artwork we created for an essay published in our Summer 2021 issue, is now available on Rarible:
If you happen to know someone who has some Ethereum to throw around, this little beautify is up for grabs for 0.05 ETH.
Hopefully this will be a success! If so, we could essentially fund our entire operations by selling one or two NFTs per issue. This wouldn’t only be great news for us, but would bode well for other literary ventures that seek consistent monetization beyond charging submission fees.
Peter Clarke is the editor-in-chief of Jokes Review. He’s the author of the comic novels Politicians Are Superheroes and The Singularity Survival Guide. Follow him on Twitter @HeyPeterClarke.