Today I made Navigating Dystopia into an NFT! Check it out on OpenSea here. I've made art NFTs before on Ethereum, WAX, and Hive. This latest one was minted on Polygon (Matic). I chose polygon because the tool I used to mint the book uses Polygon for its low fees. According to this tweet, I'm one of the first 7 people to use this tool. The tweet reads:
Alright world, the first 7 books in the #ReadMe collection by 
The PageDAO NFTBook Minter I used can be found here. The PageDAO site is here. WIP Publishing is also part of the operation. Everyone involved is great.
In all fairness, at just 40 letter-sized pages, calling my latest work a book at all seems like a stretch. I could call it a discursive autobiographical monograph, but almost no one would know what I was talking about. So I'm calling it a book.
There were a few snags in the process of minting the book, but no deal breakers. Before starting, I needed a membership token, which was airdropped to me this morning. I also designed a new cover to make the NFT book distinct from other versions of it that I may distribute.
Next, I reformatted my work and then found out that the tool required different file specifications than expected. So I had to do more reformatting. Then, knowing I'd need Matic to mint, I bought a hundred bucks worth of Matic from Coinbase and sent it to my wallet. But Coinbase didn't send me Matic on the Polygon network, they sent Matic on Ethereum. The only bridge I could find to get my tokens onto the right network in my wallet cost $110.
Balking at this exorbitant fee, I messaged a friend and he kindly sent me 0.1 Matic, which proved more than sufficient to mint my NFT. I'm still stuck holding Matic on Ethereum. If anyone knows a cheap way for me to get these tokens over to Polygon, please comment it.
The NFTBook Minter was super easy to use once I had my files prepared correctly. It cost next to nothing to mint a run of 100 book NFTs. I priced one at about $19 and it may or may not sell. I feel like it would have a better chance of selling if it was on Ethereum, but maybe Polygon has become more popular than I realize.
Putting my abuse survivor's story out there like this feels different but alright. In part, I'm consciously attempting to normalize talking about abuse, deliberately pushing social boundaries that keep the subject taboo. Navigating Dystopia pushes boundaries on other taboo subjects, as well. The work is brutally honest and unapologetic.
I feel good about putting this out there just in time for the New Year. It will be interesting to see what feedback, if any, the work produces.
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