Chances are, you’ve heard about Amazon’s platform, Kindle Vella, that focuses on publishing serialized content, such as short stories and episodes. It’s similar to other platforms like Radish and WattPad, where there’s an ever-growing demand for episode-style content.
While Kindle Vella is currently only available to the United States, I asked a friend who is publishing on Vella in anticipation of its launch, to help us better understand the pros, the cons, and everything in between.
Here’s what she said:
Kindle Vella is based on short 500-5,000-word episodes and involves a coin payment system where readers can purchase tokens in exchange for access to episodes.
Amazon is adopting the same payout structure as other existing platforms and offering 50% of the proceeds, however, they require that the first 3 episodes of every story be made available for free.
Further, Kindle Vella requires that your content be *almost* exclusive to their platform.
What I mean by almost is that their terms aren’t quite clear yet, but there is mention of the following:
You cannot upload any previously published material. This means that you wouldn’t be able to take an existing book that has been published and serialize it.
Amazon wants new content, and while they seem okay with you publishing on other serialized platforms, it needs to be behind a paywall – no free access to that content in any form.
You can, however, publish the serialized content as a full novel later, however, you must remove all episodes from the Kindle Vella platform first. But beware, it sounds as though we wouldn’t be able to return our content back to the Kindle Vella platform once it has been published elsewhere.
This means we’re limited on how much testing we can do, as once our content is taken from Kindle Vella, it can never go back in. Ugh.
All of that being said, I’m still really excited by the possibilities of Kindle Vella, especially with Radish changing their pay structure and lowering rates to where it is no longer as viable as it once was.
Here’s my plan for Kindle Vella:
I am going to focus on getting 30 completed episodes ready quickly. Each episode will be around 2000 words long (the typical length of a chapter in one of my novels). At 30 episodes x 2000-words, it’ll come out to around 60,000 words, which is the usual length I aim for with my romance.
That way, I can compile all the episodes at a later time, pull them from Vella once they’ve run their course, and publish them as a first-in-series.
Since my main genre is paranormal romance, a lot of readers in that space are used to serialized fiction since it became so popular on Radish, so it shouldn’t be difficult to build up a following.
Fingers crossed!
How about you? Are your books in Kindle Vella? Do you have a game plan?
