After the Red-Eye

“That breathless crushing panic....”

A writer I know used these words to describe the way I felt Tuesday evening when I put my best friend and business partner on a plane back to France. For the last two months, I spent almost every waking hour working side by side with him. Little habits, routines, rituals--forged out of necessity for two people sharing a mission and a car together for hours at a time--all useless now that four thousand miles stand between us. And that sucks.

Caffeine before conversation...I can no more make sure the man has his coffee first thing every morning now than he can make sure ice-cold cloths are available for me when I’m trying to die of a heat stroke. When I go shopping for groceries or office supplies or pointy things to open cell phone cases, I don’t get to learn the French words for everything in the store, nor do I get to explain the finer points of American fart jokes (hat tip to Gunnar Williamson) or what might happen if you take a dirty plate back to the buffet at Golden Corral and try to put more food on it. So much improvisational micro-culture just gone, flown away on a red-eye to Paris. To put it bluntly, I miss him.

If all this sounds personal, that’s because it is. Michel is an honest-to-goodness friend. Yes, we make a dynamic business team, but we had hella fun on the bookstore tour for Steemhouse. The bright side? We came up with some truly impressive plans to implement a fresh and robust writing community that doesn’t rely on any infrastructure currently existing on Steem.

Let me say up front that I won’t be disclosing too many details just yet. I’m not keen on the idea that some wiseass with more coders at their disposal than we have might cut in front of us and claim the strategy as theirs. It does involve a token and some committed engagement. So what I’ll do is pose a few questions and make a few related points.

One thing Michel and I saw during our tour of East Coast bookstores and libraries was a thriving “real world” community of book clubbers. Almost every library and most bookstores had at least one. Readers still enjoy getting together with other readers and talking about the novels they just read. Sometimes the emotional impact of fiction can be so profound that one almost needs a support group after turning the last page. Book clubs can function in just such a capacity.

But how do you transfer that enthusiasm for sharing to an online blockchain community? And how do you channel it into a reward system that compensates readers for the time they spend talking about the selection they just read? And how could tokens be used to fill this need by providing even more fiction for those readers to talk about, so they continue to earn and build influence points without investing a dime of “real money” into their hobby?

In the past, Steemhouse leadership spent so much time trying to figure out how to motivate readers to read the work of our writers that we failed to see the obvious: engagement is where the magic happens. This may seem obvious to some, but the kind of engagement I’m talking about has nothing to do with comments below a post, workshops, or Discord chats. Those things can play a role in a healthy blockchain community, but true engagement will come in the form of original content in and of itself, subject to Steem rewards as well as in-house tokens that will hold intrinsic value within our own ecosystem.

Don’t misunderstand--Steemhouse has not wavered one degree off course when it comes to mentoring, editing, and publication standards. We’ve also not abandoned the idea of our literary journal. Where, in fact, do you suppose our book club selections would come from? Particularly those that are installment-based or self-contained short stories. It occurred to Michel and me that a Steemhouse book club could offer weekly selections of shorter fiction and monthly selections of published novels, and participants could join both or pick and choose based on what fits their lifestyle and availability.

From there, Michel also extrapolated a scenario in which ARC feedback (Advance Review Copies) could be recorded on the blockchain without immediate public visibility, so that the review could be posted at the time of launch at the author’s discretion, yet the contributor of those reviews would still receive a tokenized reward for their work. This would be a monetized version of the NetGalley concept, for those familiar with that ARC review service.

But he didn’t stop there. Michel went on to envision a way to purchase installments of a novel one chapter at a time, which would offer an alternative to simply buying an ebook that one may end up not liking. This would allow us to collect data about how many readers finish each novel and where they stop. We could use that information to help our authors produce better work, books that consumers don’t stop reading. This system would also allow buyers to re-sell and loan their books inside the community without violating copyright.

It’s early in the Steemhouse journey, so we may encounter issues that cause us to revise or abandon some of these ideas. But the simple fact that technology exists to create this type of ecosystem for readers--not just writers--is very exciting for us.

Dissolution of The Writers’ Block earlier this year was hard on me, but if that’s what had to happen for Michel to step up and take point on the publishing project, then it was definitely worth the grief. I thank my lucky stars every day that he is not only my business partner but my very best friend in the world. I not only get to reap the benefits of his creative genius as a Steemhouse leader, but I get to hear all the little side thoughts, concerns, and hilarious brain farts he has getting there with his ideas. It is my sincere hope that the camaraderie we share bleeds over into the community and infuses it with an entirely different energy than the one we felt at TWB. We haven’t laid any foundations for that community just yet...lots of preparation left to do, some trial runs and beta tests...but it’s coming, and I’ll keep you posted about our progress.

cover photo source