An Atticus Review Update: A New Publishing Model

Summary

Atticus Review will continue to exist.

We will publish work that lasts and holds value.

We will do this by minting NFTs. 

We will become a literary marketplace. 

If you’re interested to know more, keep reading. Follow us. Reach out. 

Hi Everybody!

This is David Olimpio and Boo Trundle at Atticus Review. We have some exciting news. We are re-constituting the Atticus Review literary magazine as an NFT marketplace. This transition won’t happen overnight, but our goal is to slowly build a curated collection of NFTs—works for our readership to enjoy, admire, reread over and over again, and own. That’s right, own. Atticus readers will have the opportunity to purchase the poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and multimedia pieces that we publish as minted NFTs. We think NFTs can (and will) revolutionize the way digital creative arts and letters are exchanged, and that they can ultimately benefit the writer, the publisher, and the reader. 

Better Rights Management

With blockchain technology, writers have at their disposal a better way to preserve the rights to their work. That’s because, at its core, an NFT is simply a contract representing an asset. NFTs verify ownership. They represent that something is unique, irreplaceable (Non-Fungible), and also stamped in time.

NFTs aren’t just contracts, however. They’re smart contracts. An NFT can execute a series of rules when a sale happens. For instance, the NFT smart contract can send a certain percentage of a sale to one person (like the author), and another percentage of a sale to another person (like the publisher). It can do this automatically, with no corporate intermediaries (banks, third-party businesses like Amazon) taking a cut. 

Not only can these contracts do that on the first sale, but there can be additional rules in place to do that for any subsequent sale. So a poem, story, or essay NFT could be resold and that NFT’s royalties would be automatically distributed according to the terms of its contract.

How will this work on Atticus Review? Writing and artwork curated and minted by Atticus will debut on our website like it always has. From there, it can circulate freely across the internet and elsewhere for no charge. It could travel to Instagram, other websites, or to merchandise like t-shirts or cocktail napkins. Wherever. But the original digital manuscript, the NFT, remains a unique asset, and could potentially gain value as more and more copies circulate. 

Provenance, Authenticity, Sustainability

Another cool thing about minting pieces on the blockchain rather than simply publishing them on a website is that a digital literary NFT automatically establishes provenance, or a certificate of authenticity and authorship. In a world where AI is becoming an increasing threat to the creative work of human beings, NFTs create a record that says, this writing is original, this particular human wrote it, and when it was written, this is exactly what it said. 

Also, because it exists on a decentralized blockchain, the literary NFT will be permanent and won’t be able to be deleted by any third party. Even if Atticus Review were to stop operating someday, the work would still remain an asset on the blockchain.

Don’t worry if all of this seems overly technical right now. Writers will only have to submit a word file (or jpeg, pdf, etc) to Atticus Review, just like before. We will make the NFT. This is a good time to mention that we are planning to produce a series of tutorials to build and educate our own literary NFT community. We have been around for 14 years and our basic mission remains the same: 1) to provide a platform for awesome writing and 2) to serve writers. 

The umbrella of ideas we’ve been celebrating here (NFTs, smart contracts, permanent ledgers) are referred to as Web3. Authors who want to go forward with Atticus are probably going to be authors who are curious and/or drawn to this burgeoning digital framework. We know not all experience is digital, and that is a good thing. Atticus, however, is moving into Web3.

To bridge the gap between the traditional Atticus website and Atticus NFT, we will start with a series of poems, some of which may be ones we have already published. We’re opening our submittable to gather recommendations from our community, our cherished readers and writers. Is there a poem on Atticus Review, whether it is your own or somebody else’s, which you would like to see in our first batch of NFTs? Let us know.

Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.

David and Boo