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My experiment to use NFTs to sell books
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So I have my NFT and I am sending it out as I'm typing this. Unfortunately, if OpenSea has a way to send out all 2000 to 2000 different addresses in one transaction, I haven't found it. I could also use a third party and pay fees to have it done, but I'm cheap and am willing to put in the time to do this free.Even if I used a third party, I still need a list of 2000 addresses. Thankfully, everything on the blockchain is public!
I can open the Polyscan page for the generic token OpenSea mints all their NFTs under. This is helpful, because you probably want to send these out to wallets that are transacting in OpenSea NFTs and not just in regular crypto. I'm already mass spamming these hoping a few end up in the hands of someone who might buy a book, so I'd rather narrow the pool of recipients to those who will notice the NFT showing up in their wallet in the first place.
https://polygonscan.com/token/0x29533...
If you scroll down, you'll see every transaction made with these tokens, including the wallet addresses of the senders and receivers. This is where I'm getting my addresses. It's time consuming, and I have to collect them one-by-one. I'm sure people have bots that do this, but I don't.
I'm going to grab the addresses of those that received the tokens. Personal preference, I guess, but it's more likely the receivers are buying and acquiring. The senders could just be creators looking to sell, but not collecting themselves.
I right click on the address I want and open it in a new tab.
https://imgur.com/undefined
On the new tab, I scroll down to where it says filter by token. Click on copy address. I'm going to add that to an Excel document in case I want to reuse the same list in the future instead of going through this again.
https://imgur.com/DzwMx8t
Then I go to my NFT's page on OpenSea and click the wedge for "transfer."
https://imgur.com/dQpEauj
It will open a dialog box, asking for the wallet address and quantity to send out.
https://imgur.com/px7Fap6
When I click transfer, it will send me to another dialog asking me again to transfer. When I click the button on that box, it will connect with my wallet to ask me to sign the transaction.
https://imgur.com/Mgz0UtO
Anytime a site wants to interact with your wallet, read it very carefully. If the transaction requires a gas fee, make sure you understand how much it's asking for before you approve it. In this case, it's just asking me to sign the transaction. It shouldn't be charging a gas fee, so make sure it doesn't - don't blindly sign anything involving your crypto wallet.
Once I sign it, I wait a little bit for the transaction to process. Then I get the success screen.
https://imgur.com/qCJM0eJ
If I want, I can click on the transaction hash and view the contract.
https://imgur.com/undefined
Look down to where it says Transaction Fee, you can see it cost OpenSea 1 cent to send that NFT for me. The fee can fluctuate depending on how busy the network is, but if I was paying the fees myself, it would cost me $20 to send out all 2000. Also, if you decide to mint on the Etherium network instead of Polygon, the fees are dollars per transaction, not cents. I could be wrong, but OpenSea does not cover that - either you or the recipient pays it.
Now that I sent one out, I'm ready to send another. Because I'm working on a project at the same time, it might take into the weekend to get all of them out.
Since I'm only placing the particular coupon code with these NFTs, I can judge the success of this based on how many redemption I see. I see this as a digital version of mass mailing - companies that pay to have their ads dropped in every mailbox, or those that mass spam email addresses. I don't expect all 2000 to result in sales. Some will find my NFT in their wallet and try to sell it to get something. That may move my promo from those not interested to those that are.
Future possibilities include targeting future drops to those that hold a particular NFT. In addition to this one, I have another ready to go that I plan to send out to buyers of the book who want one. When I run a promo for the next book, I can look up the wallet addresses of everyone who holds the "buyers" NFT and send out a promo NFT with another coupon just to them, ensuring it goes to an audience more likely to buy.
I'm hoping to update this if I see redemptions. And I'm a little anxious to see how this experiment plays out.
A whole new dimension for me. Hope your experiment comes back with some decent results! Gonna be following the developments
I got 50 out, and someone sent 30 of theirs to my wallet :D
J.J. wrote: "I got 50 out, and someone sent 30 of theirs to my wallet :D"A digital barter :)
In how stupid I am, I found an option in tiny print at the bottom of the Polyscan page to download the transaction history as a csv. I can open that in Excel and find all the addresses I want in a neat column...saving myself the work of scraping them off the Polyscan page. :D
I kind of stalled after getting 3/4 of them out. :DSo far 23 views, but no sales from the NFTs
A bunch of the NFTs went up on the market as I expected, and one actually sold yesterday. I woke up to a $.25 deposit of ETH in my crypto wallet :D If I didn't mention it above, I collect a small fee when the NFTs are sold by anyone even though I'm giving them away.
J.J. wrote: "....I collect a small fee when the NFTs are sold by anyone even though I'm giving them away..."Not a proper book sale, but can be a source of side income :)
I'm going to spare you a lot of the backstory, controversies, and warnings because you could write a book. But because these things are created on the same networks as crypto currencies, you will have to get involved with crypto in order to work with NFTs. Also, I'm relatively inexperienced, so a lot of what I can tell you will be limited. I would suggest if you're interested in copying this experiment, you explore different marketplaces, the different networks, the different fee systems because you might find another crypto network or another marketplace is better for you and your needs.
For me and my experiment, I'm creating mine on a site called OpenSea, and I'm using the Polygon network. OpenSea also mints on the Etherium network, but the fees are crazy. OpenSea advertises that you don't pay gas (the fee for transacting on the blockchain), but it's not 100% accurate. You will pay the gas fee on your very first transaction to "activate" your account, and there are certain types of sales where you pay the gas fee to transfer the NFT to a new owner. For what I'm doing, I already payed that activation fee last year, and OpenSea covers the fees to send out the NFTs, so this costs me nothing but time.
To get started, you will need a crypto wallet that supports the Polygon network and that OpenSea supports. Also, you will need to buy enough crypto to cover the initial gas fees.
Hopefully, I can provide some images to show you what I'm doing, but because this is all for another pen name, I will be censoring out identifying information.
Once set up, it's pretty easy and straight-forward to create an NFT. You start off by creating a "collection" that your NFT will be a part of. When you have your collection, you then go to "create" and make your NFT.
https://imgur.com/XbECfzQ
Follow the instructions and fill out the necessary fields. Keep in mind you can edit your NFT unless you freeze the metadata, or until you start sending them out. You don't have to freeze the metadata if you don't want, but since I am sending them out, I have until the first one leaves my possession to make any changes. The promo image goes in the first field. I gave my NFT a name and added s brief description. You can add a link to your author page, or to the specific book. Etc.
Further down the page, there is an option to include unlockable content. You're main image isn't exclusive to the NFT holder - someone can always right-click/save-as if they want a copy of the picture. But the unlockable content is where you place something you don't want the public to see. On other networks, you can put a file into the NFT, but here, we can only place links. If you want to include an actual book as your unlockable content, you have to host it somewhere else and place a private link with the NFT.
https://imgur.com/C7RQlnA
All I'm including is a coupon for a discount, since I'm giving these away in the hope that someone who gets one buys a book. I generated a private coupon on Gumroad, and placed the coupon code in that field. Anyone with the NFT can open the unlockable content to find that coupon code. Keep in mind nothing stops the NFT owner from taking that code and Tweeting it out to all their Twitter followers, so I placed a limit on the number of uses, and left a note that the coupon will become invalid on a certain date. I can always create another NFT with another coupon later, but for now, this is what I'm doing.
You will also have to decide how many you want to create. for my experiment, I created a run of 2000. You can create more if you want to spam more wallets, or you can create less if you want to create something with more collector value on the secondary market. Since these are free to make and send out, I can always create a new NFT if those 2000 don't seem enough.
Toward the bottom of the page, it will ask you what blockchain you want the NFT minted on. You have the same question when you create your collection, so you can only choose the blockchain that you set up the collection under. Since I'm using Polygon, I have to make sure the collection is set up under Polygon.
When you're happy, you click create and you're ready to send them out.