I know what you might be thinking, “BitCoin? I thought you were a publisher?!”
We are. Our focus is on producing (and selling) the best books, comics and graphic novels we can.
“Right… and how’s that related to BitCoin?”
We’ve found over the years that our audience tends to fall towards the geekier side of things. When you’re selling titles about sentient zombies, second world war occult terrors and crime-fighting dolphins that’s not too much of a surprise. Along with that, we like exploring new things and trying innovative technologies.
A few years ago we experimented with a service called Pay With A Tweet; its purpose was fairly simple: to increase visibility of a product through social sharing. We decided to trial it because at the time we were giving away a free sample of an upcoming title as a way of promoting the finished product – but that alone doesn’t bring much traffic to a website. If nobody knows you have something cool available then no one will come seeking it out. What we liked about Pay With A Tweet was that we still got to give away that free sample, but in return each person that downloaded it was prompted to share a message to their followers on Twitter letting them know that they too could see the freebie.
Trying new things
Our hope with it was that – like today’s viral marketing – it would lead to huge amounts of organic traffic (for those of you that don’t read advertising blogs… that means getting visitors to your site without having to pay for advertising). To an extent, it worked. We didn’t get tens of millions of people downloading the freebie sample… but enough saw it that when the book came out we were more than happy with how it sold.
Bringing things back to BitCoin… it’s a technology that we’ve followed on and off for a few years, and which has recently exploded into the mainstream. BitCoin is a “decentralised virtual currency”; it has no tangible representation like pound coins or dollar bills, and isn’t issued by any one nation. Think of it as being a bit like money in a PayPal account – you can still earn it, spend it, exchange it for other currencies etc. And by now you might be guessing where we’re going with this…
That’s right: Deadstar Publishing can now accept payment in BitCoins using BitPay as a payment processor. It’s something we considered as far back as 2015, but our old e-commerce setup didn’t support it, and at the time it was possibly too niche an idea for even our geeky (and non-geeky) fans to use over other choices. Now though, it’s widely enough used that it would be foolish not to try it out.
Is BitCoin the future?
On that front, we have no idea. At the moment though, BitCoin is growing in popularity (and with that, it’s growing in value) and – as you might expect – we want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy cool things from us. To that end, you can consider this our next experiment!
