https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDeVv4imbJU
It’s not hard to mint a billion dollars in NFTs — I did it in less than a week. The real problem is getting rid of them.
I don’t mean delete them. That costs money, and you never know what will sell. It’s like trying to predict a viral video. There really ain’t no such animal.
Sure, some youtube creators get more than one viral video, but they can’t do it every time, because it’s a different set of factors every time.
97.4% of all youtube videos never get more than 14 views. It’s important to keep that in mind when you’re posting every day and seeing only 2 or 3 views on a video.
This happens, but it all evens out in the end. Your video will eventually earn hundreds of views, if it’s around long enough, but then, so will you.
What I mean is, there’s more than one way to sell your NFTs, but only one way to mint them.
You want to mint your NFTs for free, so you’ll want to launch them on OpenSea, where you don’t pay for listings until you actually sell them.
There’s no other way in Heaven or on Earth to get hundreds, thousands and even millions for a virtual work of art. If there were, they’d be out there already.
What IS out there is the NFT, the non-fungible token, meaning a completely unique thing, compiled with blockchain at the moment, with a change toward more eco-responsible verification codes in the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, it’s what we’ve got, and if you’re an artist who makes a living at it, you need to know about NFTs, and you need to make yourself able to sell them, as well.
Whether it’s tangible wall art or ephemeral virtual art, you’re going to go through the same torturous path of selling them to buyers, most of whom are buying the name, not the art.
When people become convinced that your stuff is going to be worth more next year than it is now, your art will sell, and only then.
Sure, Aunt Martha bought a painting, your cousin Murray bought one and a third-grader who lives next door also bought one, but this does not pay the bills.
What DOES pay the bills is some way to reach an audience of art buyers with your art, and that’s not easy, these days, with galleries totally closed — they were the first to go under when the covid hit — and nothing in the future for art exhibitions excepting online, which is what we’re trying to do, get to the online art market.
Well, paintings don’t do well in online sales, but virtual art does GREAT, if you’re making stuff that clicks with art buyers, and most stuff doesn’t, and goes nowhere.
You can tune into the latest craze and produce that, or go ahead and do what you do. The choice is yours to make, almost as if there were such a thing as “Free Will”, but we won’t go into THAT again, thank God.
A little God joke.
PERSONAL COLUMN:
- Walter, come home
- All is forgiven.
So how DO you get millions of dollars for your NFTs?
That’s not a good question. The best-practices Question of the Day would and should be, “Can I make and sell a NFT at any price?”, and that might not be answerable until you try.
You never know. The most amazing things appeal to an audience, and you just don’t know why, and could never predict it in advance. I’m not good at Predicting the Future, but predicting the PAST happens to be my specialty.
I guarantee my results, too.
You can’t trust what people say. I’ll walk down a busy street and ask every tenth person I pass what time is it, and everyone — not just a few people, but everyone — gives me a different answer!
So okay, how DO you sell your NFTS for millions of American dollars? …And what do you do with the millions of dollars once you get them?
The answer to the second question is, obviously, “Help the work community”, while the answer to the first question has always been, and remains today, totally elusive.
Not that it will remain elusive forever. You will soon enough see whether you’ve got the Midas Touch with NFTs when you make a few and put them up for sale on OpenSea.
Ten years down the line, will they still be sitting there for sale? So how do you prevent that from happening? CAN you prevent it???
The answer is, nobody knows until you give it a good, serious and sustained try. Just trying once doesn’t count. Just going through the motions doesn’t count, either.
What does count is when you get behind it and push, that’s when, and not a moment before.
Suppose you were a millionaire art collector, and you were prepared to spend some serious money to get what you wanted — a unique piece of art that actually is part of a new art movement, not just an attempt to cash in on a fad.
So you come across one of my pieces, something you like and appreciate, and the price is $1,248,512.16 today, expressed as just a few Ethereum. Pay it.
I’m serious. Pay it, and pay it gladly, and be happy that the price is above one million dollars, because that guarantees some publicity, some press coverage — and that translates into money, if you’re quite prepared to take advantage of the momentary and transitory attention on your acquisition, which you now hope to sell at a serious profit.
Like it or not, the NFT market is built around the money, not the art. The price has nothing to do with the art, either. It’s strictly what the market will bear.
It takes some underpinning to accomplish an art market for any artist. That went for all the pop artists, starting with Andy Warhol and ending with … is there an end to it? I surely hope so — it’s been thoroughly exhausted, and so am I, just beat.
See, I’m sixty years in the active art market, as a working artist who earned 90% from my art sales, and almost nothing as a working silversmith and goldsmith, photographer, author, filmmaker, editor, game developer and public lecturer.
It never occurred to me to take anything for myself out of the other things I do, because I’ve always earned enough from my art to carry me through.
That is, until recently. All of a sudden, my art sales fell through the floor. What happened?
Well, it wasn’t clear what had happened, but now it’s very clear. The public taste went virtual, especially during the Period of Isolation in the first year of the covid pandemic.
If you make NFTs, your main job and biggest challenge will be to form a collector’s group, some sort of club that collects your NFTs.
You can make them totally cheap, as accessible as possible. That’s my main recommendation, keeping in mind that they have to pay the gas fees on top of your price, so take it easy.
I put things up at Eth .01 and Eth .02, which presently come out to US $25 and $50 respectively, so add fifty bucks on top of that, and take it easy on your collectors.
Once you’ve gotten a few DOZEN sales under your belt, and you’re feeling confident, post some at .05 and just one at .10 Eth. That’s about $280 at the moment, so it might be a little beyond your crowd’s ability and/or willingness to pay.
Keep your prices low. You don’t need the money. It’s not about the money. It’s about patience.
If you’re an experienced fisherperson, you know that there is little difference between meditating under a Bodhi tree and fishing in a quiet stream.
I don’t mean trout fishing. That’s a very active sport, with casting flies and all that sort of thing.
I mean sitting propped up against a thick tree-trunk, bare feet dangling in the water on a lazy summer afternoon, with a fishing rod stuck in your hands, the fish avoiding the strange creature snoring on the mossy bank.
When the fisherperson gets impatient, the fish is lost. This is similar to what happens when you try to shake the “art gallery” tree. You scare away all the moths.
What I mean is, let them alone. Leave them to their own devices, thoughts, considerations and peculiarities.
If they buy, they buy. If they don’t, they don’t.
Does that mean to go away with your tail between your legs and give up entirely? Well, first of all, you shouldn’t have a tail. If you do, this might not be your best choice of incarnations and you should reconsider your rebirthing options next time through.
If you have a very active social circle of very rich and loyal friends and fans, you’re in luck — you don’t need to persuade, just inform.
Tell them something like “go see my stuff here” or something, and let them find your things and they will surely buy, if for no other reason than to give you support.
But I assure you that more than one friend, as close as they may be, will ALSO be thinking, “I’ll bet this is going to be worth a fortune in a couple of years”.
They may be right. They may be wrong. It’s a gamble, and you can’t stop people from gambling, drinking, or eating junk food. I guess sex would fit in there, too.
So with a sufficiently large crowd of supporters, you could perhaps sell a few dozen of your NFTs, and that’s all you need to do to get going.
Encourage your supporters to sell their NFTs at a profit and return to your page on OpenSea for more at wholesale prices!!!
You maintain the wholesale and the flow of available virtual goods, and keep the price low enough to allow a BIG profit for your supporters — you want them to do REALLY well.
What’s the payoff for you?
Who said all of a sudden that there was going to somehow open up a clear and unencumbered path of some sort of payoff to the artist?
There isn’t. The artist never gets the prize. It’s all about your collectors, and that’s the same situation you’d be in if you were a television or movie star. You might even be asked for autographs if you attend virtual programmer conventions or something.
If you don’t happen to have a giant circle of friends, join the club.
I do have a giant circle of friends, and you’re welcome to join in the circle and take your place in the crowd of artists and collectors who find themselves intensely interested in this new art form, the NFT.
And as an artist, you’ll want to figure out how you fit in — maybe it’s just a way to advertise your tangible art, to give a souvenir, the equivalent of a signed print.
It’s always about promotion, not art. It’s never about the money, but it double double isn’t about the art. It’s about the celebrity of the artist and the loyalty of the collectors.
Generally we don’t use the words “loyal” and “collectors” in the same sentence, but we have to change that when dealing in NFTs, because they are all about reputation, not about technicals. It’s an emotional thing, not a mental one.
Be patient. You’ll get there. There’s a lot to overcome, including Trust Issues — if you didn’t inherit a trust fund, you’ll have issues.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby