Hello Hive! I’ve been running an experiment for a while: publishing fiction in chunks on Hive. I’ve done a horror novella (17 posts) and a full fantasy novel (61 posts). Along with the story itself, I’ve also run several promotional “campaigns” alongside:

• 🎁 Weekly Hive contests with tokens and NFTs as prizes
• 🔖 Free-to-collect Polygon NFT Bookmarks
• 🐦 Some tweets here and there
• 👾 Posting links on Discord (where allowed)
• 🎈 Experimental publication party (when the novel finished)

My main goal was just to see what happened and what it felt like. I would like to build toward goals that help both Hive and my own profile as a writer.
 

Biggest lesson learned

The most important thing this taught me was how Web3 concepts can work beyond the DeFi and NFT hype. Because I did this on Hive, I was able to weave several activities into a very interesting system:

• Every story and contest post gave me a chance to reach readers and build a following
• Every story and contest post gave me and readers the opportunity to earn crypto
• Posting also supported the Scholar and Scribe writing community
• By playing Hive crypto games (playing games is something I’d be doing anyway), I could generate prizes to use in giveaways
• I could also use the earned crypto to fund prizes
• Cycling the contest posts into different Hive communities allowed me to share the story with different audiences
• Systems like @poshtoken encouraged and rewarded me for disseminating promotional posts on Twitter (and I could incentivize readers to do the same)
• Using non-Hive tactics like free Polygon NFTs (Cent), @dreemport, and PageDAO allowed me to showcase both the story and Hive to other audiences in web3 and beyond

 
📚 Long story short: instead of publishing my story in a vacuum and hoping the Internet would find it, I published inside the vibrant and interconnected world of communities on Hive. These interconnected communities have several crypto-token economies threading them together, and I was able to leverage that to help reach new people and provide incentives without purchasing ad space, etc.

It was all hacked together and done manually too. I feel like there is ample opportunity to build tools for creators (of any kind) to do things like this, on Hive, in a much more user-friendly and efficient manner.
 

Other lessons learned

🧩 Templates are key! Most Hiveians know that it’s a pain to retype markdown stuff over and over, so saving templates or having a good copy-paste system is important. Over time I got my publishing routine down to under five minutes per post 🙂

🏃🏼‍♀️ It’s a marathon, not a sprint. This was more of a reinforced lesson. After nearly 80 story posts and over 20 contest posts, there are a nice chunk of ‘regulars’ who follow the stories and engage… but not like, hundreds. Maybe a dozen hardcore followers and a good 30 ‘usual suspects.’ To get to the magic number of ‘1000 true fans’ is going to require many, many more posts and stories (and possibly some good ol’ fashioned luck).

💬 Communities have different engagement tendencies. It did kind of matter which community I ran the contest posts in. The gaming ones tended to be the most active—probably because their tokens have an easier path to utility (the game), so the prize felt nicer? I don’t think it’s because the right “readers” were necessarily in those communities, but I could be wrong!

🎉 This was WAY more fun than self-pubbing on Amazon. Just being able to do this within any kind of active community gave the experience so much more life. With Hive, you have all the added layers of tokenomics and experimental promotional angles.

🎁 HSBI is probably my favourite prizing “token.” It’s just such a good win-win system. I lock up a Hive, and both me and the recipient get a little boost to our Hive posts in perpetuity. The more I gift it, the bigger the boosts. It also helps keep people on Hive (in theory). In fact, keep reading and you’ll find a chance to win some HSBI right in this post!
 

Some data from The Childseeker’s War project

The total value from basic Hive rewards on 61 story posts was:

USD $249.21
_{(Sep 2022 values)}

Half to me, half to the curators. @ocd curations were the vast majority of this figure. There were also 🔼 3,193 upvotes and 💬 403 comments.

For the contest posts (18 posts):

• USD $48.70 in Hive Rewards _{(Sep 2022 values)}
• 🔼 3,113 upvotes
• 💬 1,010 comments

Most of the vote value came from @risingstargame giving generous upvotes for when I gave away STARBITS as the main prize.

I did not keep track of the L2 tokens that came in from using tags like #scholarandscribe, #vyb, #hive-engine, or #creativecoin. They were definitely worth a few Hive in total!

Below are some charts that visualize some of the stats above. I found the pattern of comments on the story posts very interesting. It follows the exact same shape as I’ve seen on other serialized stories posted on Wattpad: Big initial surge for early parts, a gradual decline, then a spike at the end as people celebrate or remark on the ending.

Here’s what I gave away (roughly, I probably missed a few) during the 18 contests and the big publication party prizes that we did at the end:

The value of these prizes is harder to pin down, since these L2 tokens bounce around a lot. As of Nov 2022 prices, it’s somewhere in the USD $60–$70 range. This doesn’t count the current or potential value of the NFTs.

Most (if not all) of these prizes were funded by just doing stuff on Hive. I didn’t have to move more cash into the system to be able to do this. Back when I found Hive I certainly put a chunk in to get me started, but I had no idea I’d be running a project like this at the time.
 

Next steps

1️⃣ Step 1: keep going! I’m doing it all over again, but this time with something at least 3x bigger than The Childseeker’s War (in terms of word count). Hunting Midnight will follow the same process as I keep marathoning towards building a fanbase.

2️⃣ Step 2: keep experimenting! Spreading out into more communities with contests is a potential idea. Switching up the promotional aspects, adding more stuff… I dunno! There’s nothing but time and there are no real rules in this space.

 
3️⃣ Step 3: engage some partners. There are all sorts of project-hungry and creative folks here on Hive. I’m hoping to be able to work with some of them to supercharge Steps 1 & 2. In fact, the wonderful folks over at Hive Pizza have already helped by letting me host my publication party on their server—so more things like that!

4️⃣ Step 4: tell this story to others. I’ve built a media kit around The Childseeker’s War project in hopes of finding some outlets to tell the broader story. You can access it here. (Google Docs folder).

My goal is to attract people both inside and outside of Hive to this web3 serialized fiction idea. Either more writers, readers, or technologists that want to see the experiment continue and grow. I am part of several non-Hive web3 communities where these seeds have already been planted… so we shall see! 🌱

5️⃣ Step 5: create formal onramps to Hive. I think with the right partners, storytelling, and strategy we can use this kind of experiment to highlight how cool Hive is, and how it’s the right place to pursue creativity of this kind. There are oodles of competitive projects and web3 products… but the bear has killed off many (while Hive keeps rollin’) and many projects cannot offer the pure flexibility and “sandbox” of the Hive ecosystem.

Thank you for your time and attention. I own the license for all images in this post, with exception to the various Hive project logos, which are the property of Rising Star, Splinterlands, Hive Pizza, WOO, VYB, CTP, Ecency and Hive itself.