Yesterday was the last chapter of the Universal Good Deal. If you want to find out what happens next, that's at the bottom of this post.
Publishing the story here was a bit of proof-of-concept for myself. I wrote it a few years ago, and tried to self-publish on Amazon, but Amazon really is like a jungle and it's pretty hard to stand out amongst all the trees. My total earnings were something along the lines of $2.17. And it wasn't even in bitcoin.
I've been lurking here on Stacker News for a while (under another name) and it occurred to me that one of the many things SN does well is make it easy to throw a little bit of money at a post.
So I wondered what would happen if I tried to republish my book here, making each chapter it's own post.
What happened is that I stacked close to 100k sats. That's more than $40 if you're counting.
And here's the thing: I don't think most stackers are interested in fiction, especially my weird, somewhat abstruse version of scifi. On top of that, SN isn't exactly a huge community. So, I was hardly putting my story in front of my target audience.
And yet, I managed to find a small group of you who enjoyed what I wrote enough to toss me a few sats each day as I published my chapters.
Imagine what it would be like if I published my story on a place where people came to read experimental scifi, but with zapping enabled. This is the future of publishing, more than that, it's the future of the Internet.
But I don't need to tell you this. You already know. It's just the rest of the Internet that hasn't heard the message yet. So I think it's time for some evangelism.
If any of you are active on other forums around the internet where there are people who post things and you think they might be interested in earning sats for those posts, I want to talk to you. Leave a note below!
What happens next in my story? Well, The Universal Good Deal is Book 1 of a 9-book series called New World. Book 2, Who Brought the Steak Tartare?, describes in great gory detail the awful misadventures of Franklin, Flinders, and crew as they navigate the harsh environment of outer space accompanied by that evil cat, Trim.
Book 2: Who Brought the Steak Tartare? will be in the same place on February 2nd.