So Monday I talked about my first attempt at a Kindle Vella story. And now I want to talk about the non-creative aspects of it. Since this story was actually published, it has allowed me to see more into the process than my first attempt when I tried to use a story I had previously published and it got blocked.
The process of loading the file isn't too hard. Unless you want to write directly on their site (being somewhat old-fashioned, I don't) you really need to save each "episode" or chapter or however you want to think of it as a separate Word file. It's easier to import as a Word .DOC than it is to copy and paste because with pasting it seems to mess up the line breaks and stuff whereas importing a file formats better.
The first time I did this I got some annoying error message that I realized after a couple of tries was because the file was "In Review." The stupid thing is I loaded 6 episodes and episodes 3 & 5 were approved before the others. Why? I don't know. Fortunately I don't think any of them were live on the site yet or it might have been weird for people to only be able to read two episodes in the middle.
Not that that was a problem because interest has not really been very strong. Like selling things on eBay or Mercari I have a number of people "following" the story--more than actually reading the story. It is like those auction sites where people "watch" or "like" something but never seem to DO anything productive.
The biggest hitch is the royalty structure. For a shorter chapter you might only get a nickel per read. For one of 2500 words you get $0.12. Crunching the numbers, I get $2.09 in royalties (US market) at the 70% royalty with an ebook. To make the same with Vella, I need to have about 18 episodes of 2,500 words or 45,000 words. And the first 3 episodes are free so you get nothing for those; thus I really need to write 21 episodes. If you do the minimum of 500 words then you'd have to have almost 100 episodes or if you do the max of 5,000 words then you only need about 11 (3 free plus 8 at about $0.25) It is fairly comparable but the difference is if someone buys an ebook I get the whole $2.09(ish) whereas with Vella that's only if someone reads all of those episodes. If they stop reading after a few episodes, you get a lot less. I'm not sure about returns; it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon let you "return" an episode after you read it.
The inverse logic though is that if I sell a 70,000-word novel on Amazon at $2.99 I only make that $2.09 royalty. If I chop that novel up into 28 2,500-word episodes, then I get $3.00 if someone reads them all.
So really the way to make money is you need people to read ALL of the episodes, which might dissuade an anthology-style story where there's not as much incentive to go from one episode to another. You really would be better off with a connected story so there's more incentive for people to read everything.
The issue right now is getting enough readers to where it's worthwhile. I had one person quit my newsletter because he/she was pissed I advertised my Vella story. "ebooks are all right but NOT KINDLE VELLA!" he/she wrote as the reason for quitting. I'm not sure what that backlash is about; maybe you can't use Kindle Unlimited for tokens and so it's not "free" after three episodes? And God forbid anyone pay for books. [eye roll]
Anyway, these are just initial findings; things might change or as is its wont, Amazon might make changes to how things work and royalties are calculated and so forth. So stay tuned!
1 comment:
That person who quit your newsletter seems a tad unstable. lol. Amazon tends to try things. Sometimes it's a huge success and sometimes not so much. They do need it to be worth it for authors to contribute, and as you said it could be give your ebooks more exposure. It will be interesting to see what happens.
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