How the Valet at The Bored Ape Yacht Club Teamed Up With A 10x New York Times Bestselling Author
On August 4th at 7:06pm, our minds were officially blown. The primary sale of our 6,942 Writer’s Room NFTs had sold out in 6 short minutes. It was over before we could even comprehend it. More than 2,000 unique individuals from all across the world showed up on that day to put their money behind their belief that the future of content will be different, and on that night, we became one team. We became the Writer’s Room, and we had taken our first step to create the world’s first community-generative novel that would feature characters owned by our members and licensed to us.
On that night, we had almost everything we needed. We had dedicated founders, amazing advisors, world-class designers and developers, artists, and more. But we were missing one piece. We were missing an iconic author to guide us through the journey of creating a world-class book together. On August 4th, after selling out in 6 minutes, we promised our community that we would find a NYT bestseller to write the debut Jenkins novel.
From that night onwards, we worked our butts off to turn our NFT project into a business. We continued designing and building our custom Writer’s Room voting and licensing portal. We worked with five different firms on everything from licensing agreements to tax law. We hosted Town Halls, started improving our Discord community management, facilitated collaborations, and more. I kept writing my own stories and sharing them with you on Twitter, but at the same time we pounded the pavement to find an author to help us write an amazing book.
It wasn’t easy finding an author. We’d spend hours with potential candidates explaining the blockchain, then NFTs, then BAYC, and then finally Jenkins. We talked about how the community would set the creative direction that the author would work within. Every time, without fail, the authors and their agents were confused. Some were nice and some told us to stop wasting their time. The infamous “We are book people” line emerged from one particularly arrogant reply.
There was a point where we looked at each other and asked ourselves if any authors would get it…
Then, one day, our advisor GMoney reached out and mentioned that he knew Neil Strauss and that it could be a good connection to make. We couldn’t believe it. The 10x NYT Bestselling Neil Strauss.
We spoke to Neil the next week and knew right away that we’d found our author. We talked about his life and his previous work. We talked about the NFT space and our vision for Jenkins and The Writer’s Room. It surprised us then — but doesn’t anymore — that Neil shared our excitement for crowd-sourced content.
“Our North Star,” he told us, “should be to create a piece of work that ends up being better through this process than it would be if we wrote it on our own.”
With the creative and the vision out of the way, we turned to our agents at CAA to guide us through the deal making process. We were fortunate again to have great partners there to work with Neil’s agent, and we were further impressed with the desire that Neil had to get the deal done, regardless of how different and unique NFT project terms are relative to traditional book deals.
I rose to fame within the Bored Ape Yacht Club (and the Metaverse at-large) because of the stories I wrote about my work for other apes. As a valet, I always did what I was asked, and I always practiced discretion. I helped patrons steal yachts, gain access to the merch closet, sneak into the mutant lab, and more. Don’t ask me about how many mistresses I snuck in through the laundry cart. As the BAYC grew, so did demand for my memoir. I saw too many things, and I held too many secrets.
It’s time for my tell-all.
There’s no better person to tell my story than Neil Strauss. Neil is the greatest memoirist alive. He is going to live and breathe Jenkins the Valet. He is going to know me better than I know myself. He will dive into my mind — the brain of the Head Valet at the Bored Ape Yacht Club — and write my first book. He will do it with the help of the entire Writer’s Room community.
Neil has made his living by diving deep into people and subcultures, and coming out the other side. He’s mastered the art of representing their voices, the ways they think, and the nuances that make them unique. He spent the better part of the 90’s writing cover stories for Rolling Stone on folks like Madonna, Kurt Cobain, and the Wu-Tang Clan.
Neil wrote The Dirt for the Mötley Crüe, which many say is the best Rock memoir of all time. He wrote I Can’t Make This Up with Kevin Hart, one of the funniest and most vulnerable memoirs ever written. Neil’s other memoirs include Dave Navarro (Jane’s Addiction/Red Hot Chili Peppers), The Jonas Brothers (yes, all three of them), Marilyn Manson, and Jenna Jameson. He is best known for writing The Game, Emergency, and The Truth, in-depth stories of his immersion in different subcultures. And his podcast investigating true crime cases, To Live & Die in LA, hit #1 on iTunes and was named by Associated Press as the best podcast of the year.
Next up for Neil is our story. The story of Web3. The Writer’s Room is going to come together to create a watershed moment for media and content in the Web3 era. There are no customers anymore. There are simply partners and collaborators. Beyond voting on the creative direction of the story that Neil will write, Writer’s Room members will also license eligible avatars (BAYC and MAYC for book 1) back to the project in exchange for profit share. This will be the first example of mass NFT licensing and IP usage that the space has seen.
Oh how far we’ve come… on August 4th, we had company founders, amazing advisors, world-class designers and developers, artists, and more. Today, we have all of those incredible people as well as Neil Strauss, the 10x NYT bestselling author, who will lead us through this journey.
And I guess you might be wondering what comes after that? We’ll go do it again in other forms of media. Then we’ll do it again, and again, and again…
- Jenkins the Valet
