Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Kindle Vella: First Impressions

I mentioned a while back I got offered contracts from a couple of places like Webnovel and Ringdom that specialize in serialized stories for people to read on their phones.  This is I guess a big thing, especially in Asia, so it was inevitable that Amazon would join the fray.  I mean why let all these small operators get all that money?

Amazon's entry into the serial market is called Kindle Vella.  The idea is that instead of just dropping a whole novel or short story on there, you drop parts of 500-1500 words or so.  They call them "episodes" so you could either do chapters of a story or maybe just different flash fiction stories that all tie into some anthology.

I wanted to try it, but I was busy and didn't want to actually write anything new. So I took the first part of Mortal Sins, a flash fiction anthology I wrote for December House Publishing back in 2013 or so and published on Amazon after they went out of business.

There were a few hitches in the process if you've been using KDP for a while.  The pasting from Word did not work all that great.  I had to go in and redo a lot of paragraph breaks and such.  It would work better if you typed it out on their site.

Instead of a traditional cover you're supposed to just use a picture without title or author name because those will be shown separately.  So I just used a portion of the Tales of the Scarlet Knight cover Rusty Webb made back in 2012.


You can see in my screen capture that it says "Blocked."  Why?  Because I had previously published it on KDP.  So I couldn't actually go through and get it online, but this did give me an idea of what is involved.

I would like to do an Eric Filler story on this just to see what the response would be, but I haven't really gotten around to coming up with an idea yet.  As you can see, it is a little different from the regular KDP platform, so if you want to try it, be aware of that.  And make sure you don't try to load something you've already published through Amazon.

If you've tried it, share your thoughts in the comments.

1 comment:

Cindy said...

I thought about trying it, but I don't have a book ready to publish. It's a good thing they're not allowing previously published books because then everyone would be putting their books on Vella a little at a time. I bet some are doing it using a different name for the story while others are trying to figure out how to game Vella. Then Amazon will have to make some adjustments. The circle of life on Amazon...lol

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