(2021-04-25) How Emily Segal Crowdfunded Her New Novel With Crypto

How Emily Segal Crowdfunded Her New Novel with Crypto. In 2011, a business-oriented artist collective called K-HOLE released a trend forecasting report—a sort of parody of brands trying to anticipate the next big thing.

K-HOLE, which disbanded in 2016, was also a launchpad for one of its members: the writer Emily Segal.

she co-founded a consultancy called Nemesis in 2017, and started her own press, Deluge Books, geared towards experimental writing from a queer perspective. Her first novel, Mercury Retrograde, was released by Deluge last year.

Finding herself in Berlin, among some early adopters coming into their first big crypto windfalls, Segal rolled her eyes.

But with the advent of the NFT craze this past winter, her attitude toward crypto changed. “All day every day, I'm thinking about how experimental writers, poets, queer people, and people who don't fit into the literary establishment or the artist establishment can create their work and get it funded and sustained and seen by the world,”

One of those projects was Mirror.xyz—a blockchain-based publishing platform in the vein of Substack or Medium

John Palmer, a crypto-oriented product designer, was the first to crowdfund his writing on Mirror with a sale of equity that worked a little like an ICO.

Palmer used his Mirror site to generate a fixed supply of ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, and called them $ESSAY

Once crowdfunded, the essay itself was minted as an NFT and sold through the online auction house Zora.

After Palmer’s success with $ESSAY, Dena Yago, another former K-HOLE member, used Mirror to issue $MOOD tokens for an essay on Billie Eilish and affect theory.

Segal decided to do the same. After getting onto Mirror (thanks to her longtime friendship with Denis Nazarov and connections in what she called “the tech bro universe”), she started a crowdfunding campaign for her second novel, Burn Alpha, which she’s described as “Q Anon meets Umberto Eco meets Gossip Girl.” Naturally, the token was dubbed $NOVEL.

It met its goal of raising 25 ETH (over $50,000) within 24 hours, thanks in part to high-profile VC backers like Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and Chris Dixon (Andreessen Horowitz).

By smuggling her work into a buzzy crypto framework, Segal managed to extract real money from the Sand Hill Road crowd.

“I shred Marc Andreessen in my first book,” she noted. It’s true: in one chapter, she takes great pains to describe two Andreessen Horowitz “suits” with “Tibetan prayer beads coiled around their wrists”

It remains to be seen whether other artists can achieve what Segal accomplished with Mirror

Segal and the other members of K-HOLE doubled down on crypto last week by auctioning off an NFT-backed diagram from its original “normcore” definition.