There are many ways to use NFTs to engage with your audience, but if you’re a writer, you might feel like they’re not for you. After all, what can a digital asset do that a book can’t?

Actually, NFTs are great tools for writers to expand the world of their story and dip a toe into the metaverse. Here are seven ideas for using NFTs with your writing:

1. Character portraits

Draw characters from your story world. If you’re not artistically inclined, use an app like Artbreeder or Generated Photos to create a character portrait. The picture above was created with Artbreeder, for example.

If you want to make your portrait more unique, use deep art to give it a distinctive look that mirrors another artist or just doesn’t look quite like anything else. You can do this for free through a variety of deep art apps, or through a website like deepart.io or loonapix. For example, here’s the same portrait in a stained-glass style.

You can also hire an illustrator from a website like Fiverr to create an illustration. There are many very talented illustrators there available for quite reasonable prices.

2. Scenes or settings from your book(s)

In addition to making character portraits, Artbreeder can also create abstract images, landscapes, anime portraits, and much more. If you want to include some images of settings from your book, you can use Artbreeder’s powerful customization features to create them pretty much how you imagine them.

NVIDIA’s GauGAN scene generator uses artificial intelligence to generate an image from a basic picture or just a text prompt. For example, here is the image it gave to me based on the text prompt “mountain castle.”

You can also create basic sketches of what you want to see and let the AI try to make a photo-realistic image. For example, here is a sketch I made of some clouds above a mountain range:

And here are a couple of the resulting sketches:

Not quite what I wanted, but it does show you some of the power of this image generator. Even though there’s a bit of a learning curve, it’s a really good source if you want to get started making outdoor scenes, or making references for any artists you work with.

If you’re looking for something a little more subjective or surreal, the app Wombo Dream can create a wide variety of images, from ordinary landscapes to surreal collages. All you have to do is enter a text prompt and choose an art style. If you want to show something of a character’s mental state, or portray a world that’s a little out of the ordinary realm of experience.

What can that look like? Here’s an example Wombo Dream image I created while worldbuilding for my new project, Shadowfire Academy. The series is set in a magical boarding school, and I feel like this image does a good job of capturing the feeling of the academy, even if it’s not strictly representational.

Here’s a picture Wombo Dream created based on the name of one of my characters, Bronwen Elvis Hagen. I was surprised at how well this image captured something of the character’s personality, even though her name is fairly anonymous. Maybe that’s confirmation bias at work.

Any of these generated images could be an NFT without much editing, although you could use them as the base on which to create art of your own. It’s up to you and your fanbase.

3. Passports to your story world

Make digital “passports” to your story world that include randomized portraits, names, statistics, or other information that’s relevant. For example, if you’re writing a science fiction story, you might include information about the passport-holder’s home world, species, and native language in their passport.

You can also create “passport photographs” with randomly-generated images of people (or other sentient beings) who could live in your world as “background extras.” If you have a story set at a school for vampires, for example, you could create portraits of vampire students who could be at the school, even if they don’t correspond to any of your characters.

4. 3D Models of characters, settings, or objects in your story.

If you know how to render 3D scenes, consider using that knowledge to you’d rather not make the scene yourselfcreate models of settings or scenes from your book.

If you don’t know how to render, no problem! You can use free apps like SketchFab (there’s also a Pro version for $30/year) and Daz3d to create virtual versions of scenes or objects in your story world.

5. Writing prompts.

Create tens or even hundreds of thousands of writing prompts using a fill-in-the-blank style template. For example, the bottom layer of your image could look something like this:

• Once upon a time, there was a ______.
• Every day, ___________________________.
• Until _________________________________.
• Because of that, ____________________.
• Because of that, ____________________.
• Because of that, ____________________.
• Until one day, _______________________.
• Ever since then, _____________________.

Next, you can create layers with possible answers for the fill-in-the-blanks, such as events, characters, and consequences for their actions.

If you’re not sure how to create 10K+ NFTs at one go, start with this tutorial.

6. Randomly-generated background characters.

Create “passport photographs” with randomly-generated images of people (or other sentient beings) who could live in your world as “background extras.” If you have a story set at a school for vampires, for example, you could create portraits of vampire students who could be at the school, even if they don’t correspond to any of your characters.

If you’re not sure how to create 10K+ NFTs at one go, start with this tutorial.

7. Trading cards.

Similar to the passports above, you can create Magic the Gathering-style trading cards for your characters, for randomly-generated background extras, or for different objects in your story. Trading cards are huge in the NFT world right now, so give this a look and see if this is right for you.

What are NFTs?

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a digital asset, like an image, video, or audio file, that’s stored on a decentralized ledger called a blockchain. This blockchain ledger provides a proof of ownership for the asset without restricting copies made by others.

NFTs have experienced sharp spikes and falls in popularity, with some NFTs selling for as much as an entire house. That’s more the exception than the rule, so don’t think you can pay off your mortgage just by uploading a picture of a duck.

However, NFTs are an exciting bridge between the art world and blockchain technology. If you’re a writer, this is an area where your knowledge of storytelling could help create new types of digital assets that can be used across the web.

Conclusion

NFTs are a fun and relatively easy way for writers to create digital content that can be shared with potential readers. You don’t have to be a great artist or a tech whiz to get started. What other types of NFTs do you want to make?