Here's what I learned from them:

AI-Only Pieces Rarely Work

You'll spend more time editing an AI-only piece than writing one on your own. And that's ignoring the mental distress of editing bad writing. You'll know what I mean if you've been in an editing position.

While no one can doubt that the AI writing assistants can help you power through writer's block, there's little else they can do effectively without human huidance.

Hybrid Content is The New Normal

If AI-only pieces don't work, then that means human writers and editors need to manage them, giving birth to hybrid content.

Verblio recommends a back-and-forth paragraph-per-paragraph approach towards hybrid content.

First, have the AI produce the outline. Edit it yourself.

Then, have the AI produce the first paragraph, and edit it yourself.

You'll then feed the AI the paragraph you produced, with a command specifying it to "imitate your voice", and have it produce the next paragraph.

Repeat this until you finish writing the draft, and then fact-check, add sources, and do some final tone edits.

And voilà! Your hybrid content piece is ready for publishing.

Human-Only Is Still in Demand

Despite the rise of AI, there is still a significant demand for human-generated content. The human touch brings a unique perspective and depth of emotion that AI-generated content often lacks.

Streamline your AI Content

To make your AI content creation more effective, here are some tips:

• Provide a sample of your voice to make it easier for the AI to emulate it.

• Keep your outline granular and provide bullet points to specify what it should discuss.

• Stay between 400-1000 words, as AIs start getting repetitive or vague after that.

• For local content or specific formats, you can mass-produce it easier.

• Instead of having the AI build the entire article, have it build your content one paragraph or section at a time and then edit it with a human writer's help.

What are your experiences with AI writing? Let me know in the comments!

But if you want to edit on the fly, try out these AI editing tips for yourself:

Fact-Checking

Remember that just because AI content sounds confidently true doesn't mean it's factual. Always double-check all statistics, numerical dates, and important data.

As we saw with Google's Bard AI mistake with the James Webb Telescope, AI can make (very public) mistakes.

A quick Google Search usually helps you weed out mistakes.

Plagiarism

AI writing assistants like Jasper AI or Yaara AI rarely produce plagiarized content, but it's always good to double-check.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, can be more prone to accidental plagiarism. I personally swear by Grammarly Premium’s checker, but there are many other free tools you can use.

Tone Correction

We all know AI can sometimes sound.. well, like an AI. Try to manually edit it to sound more conversational or use tone commands to steer it in the right direction.

Most templated AIs have a tone prompt, and Jasper AI is particularly good at following these. If you're using ChatGPT, you can use the following tone commands:

• Rewrite [X] in the tone of [celebrity, famous speaker]

• Rewrite [X] in a [modifier] [tone adjective] tone.

Modifiers: slightly, somewhat, noticeable, imperceptibly, majorly, significantly.

Tone adjectives: whimsical, rude, furious, energetic, wholesome.

What are your own tricks for correcting AI-generated content?

There are more things you can do other than NFT books in Web3.

Here are some of the best ones:

Web 3 Video Game Story Writing

Illuvium is the necessary Pokemon-esque game, like Axie Infinity but focusing on the creatures rather than the collecting and breeding aspect.

Edenhorde, for example, has an ongoing story.

Web3 WhitePaper Writing

I’ve written three white papers for NFT book projects during my freelance writing career. These are well-paid but also time-consuming gigs.

Whitepaper writing involves putting into detailed Web3 jargon all the ins and out’s of the Web3 project. 

Web3 Newsletter Writing

Writing a newsletter about Web3 and writing a Web3 newsletter isn’t the same thing. 

Their app is easy to understand and can be monetized with time. Newsletter writing is often lucrative and rarely needs you to be on top of much. You just have to be good at marketing.

Freelance writers with an active newsletter in Web2 can move their e-mail subscriber list to Web3 through Paragraph.xyz. They have an import newsletter feature that makes this process easy.

These are the primary ones:

Daily Active Members

If your Discord is full of people, but only ten get on consistently and interact with your Web3 project’s updates, then you’re in for some trouble in the long term. 

That’s why knowing how many active members you have on your server is essential.

Community Sentiment

Community sentiment is more qualitative than the number of members, yet still important to measure, as it lets you know your community's overall interest and trust towards the project's goals.

Some Web3 projects might think that simply having their Discord active is enough to keep their community engaged. Were that the case, every Web3 project would be worth millions overnight.

A successful community will take more than that: crypto giveaways, Twitter Spaces, video calls with the community, contests, and meets and greets are all actions that can improve community sentiment in a Web3 project.

Customer Retention

Customer retention is the rate at which a Web3 project’s community members stay within the project during a specified timeframe.

Loyalty programs can increase retention, which offers new ways to connect with the community.

The best way to measure the effectiveness of a  loyalty program is through Web2 data analytics.

If you understand all of these metrics, you’ll be able to grasp your project members’ customer persona and customer journey. 

Here are five lessons we learned from the FTX crypto crash:

Not your keys, not your crypto

Cryptocurrency exchanges aren’t banks. They’re not obligated to keep your money safe, and you shouldn’t trust them to insure anything you own.

As reliable as Binance, Gemini, and others might seem, they’re exchange platforms. There are benefits to keeping your crypto with them:

• Lower fees by not having to withdraw the crypto to your wallet.

• Higher yields by keeping your crypto in the exchange.

• Perceived accountability of the exchange in case anything goes wrong.

Though, I don’t think these are enough to outweigh the possibility of your crypto evaporating overnight! 

Better keep your crypto safe in your wallet. 

Don’t centralize the decentralized. 

“The future will not be centralized. But we must build it.” -Shingo Lavine & Adam Levine.

Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin to provide an alternative, decentralized payment system. Other cryptocurrencies were designed, and this gave birth to Defi.

Web3 is the antithesis of banks. 

Why give your crypto to an even riskier bank without any responsibility for your financial well-being? 

Cults of Personality in Web3 Tend to Backfire

​​"There is trust in a guy that goes around, wears a suit, and gives himself a name like ‘Bankman.’ -Vitalik Buterin. 

FTX got to where it did because of the excessive shilling of their marketplace and Sam Bankman-Fried’s public speaking, donations, and VC support to many rising talents in the Web3 environment.

They had so much marketing that even people out of crypto knew about FTX or knew their favorite celebrities had a stake in the company.

People thought of SBF as the next JP Morgan. Influential firms believed anything he said and took his word for granted until his house of crypto cards crashed. Sequoia Capital invested in them and praised SBF to the moon and back. 

Many crypto traders want to hold someone accountable for their mistakes or at least someone to listen to in an environment with so much conflicting information.

These cults of Internet personalities are just another form of centralization. People thought SBF was a savior figure due to his belief in effective altruism and giving away his fortune to charity. 

Like! What fortune can he give away now? 

Now, crypto Reddit is convinced that he’s a psycho.

Remember Satoshi Nakamoto? Despite creating Bitcoin, no one has heard of him ever again. That’s decentralization. 

Reports of Bitcoin’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

“Bitcoin has officially died 466 times.” -Anonymous Redditor.

There’s a page known as Bitcoin Obituaries. They keep track of every time Bitcoin has been pronounced dead.

Its most recent death was on November 14, 2022. Its oldest one was on December 15, 2010.

In 2022, Bitcoin was pronounced dead 26 times. 

People are still investing in Bitcoin, and interest in Web3 remains high as ever, if not higher, due to the bile fascination with the FTX controversies.

Bitcoin already went through Mt. Gox. The crypto industry as a whole survived the TerraLuna collapse.

It will undoubtedly go down. There’s an expected bottom of $11k, or even $9k, which sucks. 

It’ll take time for BTC and other cryptocurrencies to recover. Mark Cuban still has faith in crypto.

FTX will not be the Bitcoin killer. 

Despite everything, crypto has done well in the last few years.

“Stocks are boring. I am a degenerate gambler and need something that is moving faster!” -Anonymous Redditor.

Jokes aside, no kind of investment is for impatient people. You need to do your own research (DYOR) before spending a dime on crypto, but know that it’s not such a badly-performing investment vehicle as the media tends to reinforce.

The issue here is not Bitcoin or crypto altogether. It’s the centralization of these assets. If you invested $100 in Ethereum in July 2016, you’d have $10,900 today. 

If you invested $100 in Amazon back then, you’d have $260.

That doesn’t mean stocks are wrong or that crypto is inherently better.  More than anything, these days have been a tough-love lesson for crypto investors. 

Never put your eggs in one basket or your crypto in a stranger’s hands. 

To mark my first year working with NFT book stories, I've compiled a list of book NFT projects with great concepts that go beyond publishing books in an NFT marketplace.

These projects attempt to revolutionize how we absorb stories and break trends:

Readl Stories

Readl is one of the pioneering projects in the book NFTs department, but their Readl Stories program has set them apart from the crowd.

Readl Stories creates collectible NFTs of a short story, poem or a character’s backstory. It could also be a book prologue or its first chapter.

The focus is on flash fiction, plus audiovisual content. You can distribute your story for free or make it gated content as NFTs.

They’ve recently held a contest giving crypto to the three winnings Readl Stories uploaded on their platform.

In Writing

More than book NFTs, In Writing turns texts into NFTs. These can be poems, text art (think emojis made out of :(o)_(o):) or tweets. They are minted on Polygon and can be shared on social media, with some selling for over 750 MATIC.

Soltype.io

Soltype is the first NFT book platform on Solana, and is similar to Readl in principle. You upload an ePub or PDF file to their platform and mint it.

What sets them apart is their upcoming Storyworlds feature. Storyworlds are like each writer’s personal universe, a place where readers can directly interact with them, earn some of their royalties, or help crowdfund them.

Storya App

Storya's concept is storytelling through books and audiovisual content in Web3. It allows creators to submit a story text and turn it into a storytelling experience translated into multiple languages. The stories are available on Web2 and Web3.

Paragraph.xyz

A bit ironic that I'm using Paragraph.xyz's to write about Paragraph.xyz, but that's how good the Web3 newsletter app is right now. Newsletters are already popular in Web2, and all it would take for established creators to migrate their subscriber list. 
Paragraph.xyz’s audience can be easily grasped from the get-go: established creators interested in moving their Web2 content to Web3 and getting the best of both worlds. For that, these creators would need to be already interested in Web3.

If you've enjoyed today's list, subscribe to Books in Web3 to learn what's new in the world of literary NFTs every day.