The Dbooks project is an ongoing project that is attempting to build a simple and intuitive way to self-publish books and earn royalties and payments in perpetuity to serious writers on the Steem blockchain.
DBooks was borne out of several issues with using the steemit platform as a self-publishing tool:
There is no way to automatically and intuitively arrange posts into series that would allow users read posts in order.
Knowledge loss to time as old but gold article series gets pushed down the blockchain after they have paid out their rewards.
Generally poor rewards for fiction and non-fiction series writers.
The 7-day reward payout limit makes steemit an illogical choice for self-publishing serious work.
Dbooks hopes to remedy these problems and many more by:
Providing self-publishing tools for chronologically ordering publications into books.
Promoting books by popularity and demand rather than the date of publication or popularity of the writer(s).
Extend rewards for Authors by allowing them to monetize their books and rent out said books to the general populace for a self-set fee, and also create a reward pool from the 20% service charge which would be distributed to the users every month based on the interactions their publications get. This reward pool constitutes 50 % of the 20% gotten. This we believe would help in creating a sustainable reward for hardworking writers.
By doing all these, we hope to build a world-class self-publishing company built with the steem blockchain and be able to compete with any other self-publishing platform/online bookstore in the foreseeable future.
We hope to be a self-sufficient company in the nearest future as we have clear monetization goals and strategies that would make our business scale easily and successfully.
We charge users 20% of their payouts which is used for site maintenance and development levies, and also a share in the reward pool.
We also charge users between 20% and 30% of their rental fees as platform fees.
OUR FUNDING TARGETS
However, given that the project is in its infancy and most of these rewards are currently in cents, a serious cash infusion is needed.
We have the following funding targets
500,000 SP (steempower)
15,000 USD equivalent in SBD.
The 500,000 SP delegation would go into promoting posts written on the DBooks platform ONLY, which in turn would improve the writers 7-day rewards on steemit and also improve the DBooks reward pool which would be shared by the writers.
The 15,000 USD would provide much needed short-term cash injection into the project allowing us to do things like:
Equipment Upgrade: Both in development equipment and hosting servers and storage capacity.
Mainstream promotion of DBooks both on the blockchain savvy platforms and mainstream advertisement media.
Hiring of ad-hoc dedicated front-end developer and graphics designer to take our front end design to the next level of awesome.
Creating funds to help kickstart the monthly reward pool share thereby eliminating the time it would have taken to power down rewards for that month which would take roughly 3 months.
We are not looking at the small picture, and are looking for ways to make DBooks one of the most popular steemit tools in less than 3 months.
Stretch Goals
It is difficult to foresee a situation where we exceed our goals and have too much money at hand. But if we do, there are many options we can explore:
We could power up the excess fund to increase our's and our writer's earning power.
We could carry out even more mainstream advertisement.
But really, our funding requests really shouldn't easily prove to be more than adequate.
Our business model is not without faults
Books can be published entirely or in part on the steem blockchain, which means part or the entirety of the books would be available for free on the writer's steemit page. so users can easily search and find chunks of the book on steemit.
This is a double-edged sword as publishing on the steem blockchain provides short-term earnings for both us and the users. So we can't explicitly discourage it or encourage it either.
But we have a good plan for each problem
The double-edged sword has a simple solution. At first, our strategy was to hide our writer's steemit personality from the users, but we assume our users are smarter than that. So a new option is being explored where for each chapter of the book, only 1/3 of the content gets published to steemit, with the rest of the article hidden and can only be read via a link to our site. Thereby drawing in more users.
Rewards
Donate SBD to claim the reward that you want! 92% of donations go towards funding this campaign.
250 SBD: “Wow you just blew our mind!” Estimated Delivery: June, 2018
Get a mention on our steemit post, a branded T-shirt, names would be on our site as sponsors and a free voucher to rent 5 books a month + a video/video call appreciation.
account on steemit.
