First timer who could really use some guidance on best practices

Hi there. First-timer here who’s disoriented with this process because I don’t have my bearings yet. Rather than tell you what I’ve learned so far and take up your time, I think it would be best to tell you my objective, and if you could please let me know the best route to accomplish it.

My objectives might be naive and in need of correction, eg I just learned today that most NFT collector mints are random ones from the contract? That surprised me, I thought people were picking the art they were minting and so I wanted people to be able to pick what they were buying from my collection, and that was not necessary. This is the kind of nuanced feedback I’m lacking here.

I’d like to do the following, if any of these goals are misguided or there’s a better option please lmk:

  • mint and own my own contract
  • list around 150 different NFTs in this collection
  • I’d like the collectors to mint the NFTs when they buy them. I deploy the contract, I provide the NFTs in the contract, collectors mint (is this standard?)
  • I’d like to list these on the chain most associated with quality NFTs and that gives the collection the highest chance of success (is this ethereum? an L2? if so which one).
  • do this in the most cost-effective way possible insofar as fees are concerned (if an NFT aggregator picks up my work and it sells there, do they take a % of the sale?)

Thanks so much for your time and any help,
Dmitry

This documentation and our FAQ might be helpful in understanding how to distribute tokens:

Basically there are different concepts here, primarily preminting/creating a mint page.