I know it has been a while since you’ve heard from me and I’m sorry for that. I hope to get back to a regular communication schedule in the weeks ahead. For now, please accept my apologies for the long silence. I promise I have not been idle!
The good news is that I’m as recovered from my bout with Long Covid as I think I’m going to get. The bad news is that it is, at best, about 70% of my former capacity and I suspect that is as good as it is going to get. These past thirty-one months of struggling with the lingering symptoms of the disease have taught me both patience and acceptance, so I’m okay with that. I’m alive, I’m able to do what I love even if only to a limited extent, and I’m ready to move forward. Thanks for sticking around while I worked through it all!
I’ve got several bits of news to share over the next week or two and I’m going to start with the big one.
This coming Thursday, October 17th, I’m going to publishing a limited, 5000 copy, collectible digital NFT edition of The Heretic in conjunction with a company called Book.io. This will be a history-making event, as it will be the first time that a book from a contemporary New York Times and USA Today bestselling author will be released as an NFT collectible, and I’m absolutely psyched about it! Once these 5000 copies are gone, that will be it. They won’t be published in this way ever again.
(Okay, hold up a sec. If you don’t know anything about NFTs or blockchain technology, you need to read my article here for anything else to make sense.)
Back with me? Okay, moving on…
What makes this edition even more special is that it will have 100+ different pieces of AI-assisted cover art. Each book will be numbered, and each piece of art will have a corresponding rarity figure attached. The rarer the cover, the more potential value that edition of the book may have over time.
Think about them like collecting baseball cards. All of the cards have value, but a Babe Ruth rookie card is worth one heck of a lot more than a modern rookie player’s card. The same is true for this set of collectible NFT books – a rare cover edition is worth more than an edition with a common cover, but they both will look great on your shelf!
The cover art will be themed in ten different categories. Listed most common to most rare these are The Echo Team, The Templar Cross, The Swamp Graveyard, The Spear, The Revenant, The Corpse Hounds, The Necromancer, The Adversary, Gabrielle Williams, and Cade Williams. There will be a couple thousand copies of The Heretic with one of eighteen different Echo Team covers. There will only be four copies with a Cade Williams cover and each of those covers will have a unique design, making them the rarest available in the set!
Here are some of the covers, from The Spear, the Corpse Hounds, and the Gabrielle themed groups, respectively.
| The Corpse Hounds cover variant |
| Gabrielle Williams cover variant |
These books will be minted in a first-come, first-served lottery on Thursday afternoon. In order to obtain one, you will need to create an account on the publisher’s website (Book.io) before Thursday with a login name and password.
Because these books are on the blockchain, you will also need to create a cryptocurrency wallet and purchase them with ADA, the currency of the Cardano blockchain. Doing both of these things is very simple, but I’ve set up a page at the link below walking you through creating a wallet and buying some currency so you’re ready when the time comes.
The book will cost 55 ADA, which is currently about $21 USD, and it will be delivered into your wallet once the transaction is complete.
Book.io has spent the weeks since their initial launch publishing NFT editions of public-domain titles, like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Moby Dick. Each of these titles have also had AI-assisted art of various rarities and have been a huge hit, selling out in mere minutes. Books that cost $25 have then resold on the secondary collector’s market for thousands of dollars. Even better, for the first time in history, when a copy is resold, the author gets a piece of the sale price. A small piece, but a piece nonetheless and that’s never been possible before.
I hope to release all of my work as limited collectible NFT editions in the future. In order for that to happen, though, I need this first book to do well and I’m asking for your help in making that happen!
Even if you are not interested in buying one for yourself, it would be especially helpful if you could share or retweet the various social media posts I make leading up to the launch next week, helping me spread the word as far and as wide as possible.
If you are interested in learning more, click the link below to be taken to a page that will walk you through the various steps you need to be ready for the mint.
As always thanks for your support – I appreciate you all!
YES, I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE HERETIC NFT!