David J Meyer
Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash
Today, we are thrilled to announce 2 very exciting updates to the Spatium Stories platform!
These were both feature requests that came in during our self-publishing beta. Proof that beta testing works 🙂
Pegged Prices: the ability to peg your book price to USD
Automatic Payments: if your book sells on another Deso app, you still get your payment automatically
Let’s take them one at a time.
To fully appreciate this update, you first need to understand the problem we solved.
Pegging prices solves a pretty big problem not just with Spatium Stories, but with NFTs across the board on any chain.
See, when you mint your book as an NFT on Spatium Stories, it’s minted on the Deso blockchain. When you do that, there are a lot of things set immutably in the book NFT.
That’s the whole point of NFT’s, right?
The cover, the book file itself, the details you provided about your book (description, author, etc), and the royalties you receive on secondary sales. All of that is baked into the NFT and will NEVER change.
That’s what we want. That’s the definition of “decentralization” in this context.
The only thing that can change is whether your NFT is on sale or not, and at what price it’s set for sale.
However, there is something in that last sentence that catches people. If it’s set for sale, it’s set on the NFT itself, which means it’s set to the blockchain’s cryptocurrency. In this case, $Deso.
So when you set the price of your book, our self-publishing flow has a section where you can set it in USD or Deso.
This is just a pretty UI feature so you don’t have to convert to Deso if you don’t want to. Other NFT platforms do this too. I know NFTz, Diamondapp, and others do this for Deso.
However, when you set that book to $10, on the backend we take that and convert it to Deso for you and set the price of the book in Deso.
Following so far?
Do you see a problem yet?
Deso, like all cryptocurrencies, is pretty volatile.
Now, some NFT projects might not care about volatility. A lot of projects are all about quick sales, sell-outs, increased rarity, etc. However, books can carry a shelf life.
You might not sell out your book immediately, and that’s ok. Especially if you publish a MOD copy of your book, which has infinite supply unless you discontinue it.
But there is an issue when the price of your book is so volatile.
Let’s take an example.
When I first joined Deso, the price of 1 Deso was always floating around $100! I bought a few NFTs back then for like 0.8 Deso. Back then, that was a decent amount of money for me.
Today, that same amount of Deso is worth $8 instead of almost $100!
See the problem?
What if I put out a crazy rare book for $100, and then the price of Deso tanks and someone comes and buys it at $5? That blows.
Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash
In one sense, that’s the world of crypto, right?
But if we ever want to mainstream this crypto thing, this is a huge friction that needs to be solved.
That’s why we have introduced Pegged Prices.
Now, after you publish your book, you can go to your author page (coming soon) and select whether you want to peg your book to USD or not.
It’s totally optional, but it’s there if you want it.
When you use the Pegged Price feature, then a few times a day our automated system will adjust the price of your book for you to whatever the current exchange rate is!
Now, if you put your book up for sale at $12, it will stay that way! You don’t need to worry about Deso’s price anymore.
Of course, your payment still comes in the form of Deso, but maybe that can change one day too ;)
The next big feature release is Automatic Payments.
But wait, didn’t automatic payments already exist?
That’s a great question, narrator. They sure did!
Anytime someone buys a book directly through spatiumstories.com the author gets their payment automatically.
Where is the problem, then?
The problem is with our RARE books.
See, the limited edition books you sell are able to be put for sale on the Deso blockchain. That means people can buy them on ANY Deso app.
First, that’s freaking awesome!
Can we take a moment to recognize the power of Deso? I mean, I don’t know any other NFT book marketplace that can offer that.
If you publish a brand new limited edition of your book and someone sees it scrolling through Desofy, they can buy it straight through Desofy!
No more clicking on some other link, setting up or logging into Amazon, buying it, etc. It honestly takes 2 clicks and they’ve bought your book without leaving their app.
That’s cool!
And the link to read our books is always embedded in the NFT so they just click the link and start reading!
Super cool and powerful stuff!
Buuuutttt…it does cause an issue.
If that person buys that book on Desofy, we are not notified. I mean, we are notified, but it’s not connected to our system so we can’t issue automatic payments to authors.
…until now!
Today we have officially launched our own automatic payment system. Anytime someone publishes a RARE book, we will add those to our own database.
This brings our total database usage to 3 tables: 1 for R2M2 book lists, 1 for Automatic Payment, and 1 for Pegged Prices.
Notice there is no database for anything to do with the data associated with the actual book itself.
The book URL, the book file, the book encryption keys, the book description, and the cover image? All stored on-chain!
That’s decentralization.
Back to our system.
So every hour we just do a simple check to see if any of the books in our DB have sold and if they have we issue a payment to the author and remove that book from our DB.
This only has to happen for primary sales of the books because secondary royalties are built into the blockchain itself.
So there it is!
Our two latest and greatest features!
We have started with our two RARE books, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Both of these are now set to $10 and that will stay that way instead of fluctuating with Deso.
After a few days if we don’t see any issues, then we will release this for our authors to add to their own books.
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Very interesting project, and I also like the Deso integration. But I don't see a social feed for the books, so that they can be discussed for example. Am I missing something. Otherwise, I like the idea of publishing a book as an NFT.
Much appreciated! You are correct, social feeds for books are not implemented on the platform yet. Although, the books are all Deso NFT's so you can share them, comment on them, etc on any Deso app. That being said, I have plans to add unique features (especially once Access groups are added) so you can have private group chats (what we'll call book clubs) or other ways for authors to have instant access to their fans.
I don't know of anyone else doing this kind of thing. Sounds great to me.