Kindle Vella Needs Some Tweaking to Work for Most Authors and Readers

After giving it the old college try, I gave up on Kindle Vella. If you don't know, Kindle Vella is Amazon's attempt to replicate a host of phone apps where people buy chapters of a story instead of a whole book and read them on their phone.  It's been a huge deal especially in Asian countries.

Last October I tried really using it for the first time under the Eric Filler banner.  Inspired by the Marvel What If...? show, I wrote a 21-chapter story about characters from different Eric Filler stories being brought together to fight a menace destroying whole universes.  It was really more of a sci-fi action thing than a traditional gender swap story, but I thought it was a fun way to get my feet wet in the format.

The results were pretty lackluster.  Only one person read the thing all the way through.  The reads went from over 30 for the first episode to about 20 for the second and 10 for the third.  Those episodes are free, so it's kind of surprising that 2/3 of readers didn't bother to read the remaining two free episodes.  And of course after that it drops off to just a couple until you get only 1 reader for the last 9 episodes.

Despite that, it made a lot more money than some of my regular books because the first few months Amazon handed out some fat bonuses even to people like me who didn't really sell that much.  I think a lot of that was trying to encourage authors to use Vella more.  The problem with that, like when the government sends out a "stimulus" payment is the benefit is very short-lived.  The rewards completely dried up--along with readers--by February.

I even put the first 12 episodes into a bundle to give away to newsletter subscribers who clicked a special link.  To avoid Amazon pulling the story on Vella because it's "published" elsewhere (like they did when I tried copying my Scarlet Knight flash fiction series over to Vella) I only distributed this bundle by email.  And did anyone read those 12 episodes and go on to read the rest?  Nope.  Not a single fucking one.

I could only upload the picture of the woman; the rest of the cover was made by Amazon in their format, so don't say that I'd get more readers with a better cover.

Since that wasn't a "normal" Eric Filler story, I decided to take another swing and do something more like a regular Eric Filler book, only serialized.  Night at the Swapping Mall was built off the Swapping Mall franchise.  The core of that is a woman with magic powers bought an old mall in the suburban Midwest (I think of the malls in Saginaw, Midland, and Bay City where I grew up for inspiration) and converted it into a one-stop gender change shop.  Basically the stores are largely the same only they're not really for buying stuff; you pay to change into a female body and then the stores full of clothes and other stuff are like accessories to use.  If someone pays enough money they can stay that way forever, or otherwise they change back after about a day.

Maybe I just don't think enough of my readers, but I figured most of them weren't going to read on after the first 3 free chapters no matter what I wrote about, so I decided to make those a sort of prologue that is pretty much a self-contained story.  After the mall closes down, a boy goes to paint graffiti on the walls and the new owner sends him back in time to 1972--as a woman!  And there he meets another woman protesting the mall's construction and they end up fucking before he warps back to the present, having learned a lesson.

Then the paid episodes are a separate story about a thief who breaks into the mall.  When he tries to go into one of the shops to plunder it, he's warped back in time to 2008--as a woman.  Once he sort of does a Quantum Leap thing there, he's brought back to the present, but he's still stuck in the mall.  Trying to escape, he goes into the mall's movie theater and warps back to 1977 at an early screening of Star Wars, where he's a woman cosplaying Princess Leia.

By that point I realized a problem with my original idea:  why would the guy keep going into stores if he knows they're going to warp him back in time?  It might have been better if I'd gone with my original thought and had like 3-4 guys and they all split up and hit different stores and go to different times.  At least two might have worked better because then they could learn valuable lessons and maybe hook up with each other.

But to get around that the guy goes to the bathroom, because that wouldn't be booby-trapped too, would it?  Of course it would! 

I dropped the episodes pretty much as I wrote them...and literally no one read them.  I advertised them on my website and Facebook and that got a couple of people to read the first episode.  One or two read the second episode.  No one read anything after that.

The next time I did my newsletter I made sure to mention the Vella story.  And like 15 people read the first episode...and maybe a third read the second story...and one or two read the third story.  And no one read any of the episodes you have to pay for.

Since no one has left any comments, I'm not sure why people don't read all three of the free episodes at least.  Why quit after one episode?  I wonder if it's because there's not sex in it but do they really expect there will be sex right off the draw?  I mean you might need a little wind-up before getting into that.  I thought they'd stick with it at least through 2 episodes, but they couldn't even do that.  Maybe they're so unfamiliar with the serial format that they think an "episode" is going to be a complete story?  I suppose some people could use it that way, but I just use them like chapters, so each episode is a piece of the greater whole, not an entire story unto itself.  I also put a poll at the end of the 3rd episode asking if people want to go on but no one could even answer an anonymous poll. [eye roll]

So I guess I'm done with Kindle Vella.  Though like the mob or Hotel California, getting out can be hard.  If you click the "Unpublish" link, it doesn't just unpublish the story.  Nope, you have to send an email, which means going to another page and selecting a category for the email and so on.  And then, some idiot named "Mustafa" probably in India just sends back a boiler plate email asking for more information.  As if what browser I'm using has any bearing on this at all.  He clearly didn't understand (probably only has a faint grasp on English) and so was just trying to stall or pass the buck to someone else.  That was I think for my first Kindle Vella story.  For Night at the Swapping Mall, a different customer support moron named "Alexander" just blocked the book.  Which is not what Amazon's own site says.  It says:

To remove content from the Kindle Vella store, contact us. It’ll be removed 60 days after receiving your request. This provides current readers a chance to finish reading story episodes. Note: once your story is removed, it cannot be undone.

So apparently their own staff don't know their own procedures.  

When I emailed about that, of course they tried to cover with more boilerplate nonsense:

Hello,

When we find that publishers are out of compliance with a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) policy, we let them know so that they can address the issue. This helps ensure a better experience for customers.

For security reasons, we can't provide details about our internal procedures. 

OK, "Jack," the idiot didn't block it because of "content;" he blocked it because he didn't know what the fuck he was doing.

Someone named "Junaid" did at least send me the proper email when I asked about unpublishing my other story, Guardians of the Swapverse:

We received your request to unpublish Guardians of the Swapverse. We’re sorry to see you go. Since Kindle Vella stories are read one episode at a time, we unpublish Kindle Vella stories 60 days after we receive a request to provide active readers the chance to finish reading a story they may have started. We received your request on 04/21/2022 and I’ve scheduled your story to be removed from the Kindle Vella store on 06/21/2022 We'll send you an email confirmation after your story has been removed.

If you change your mind and want to keep your story live, you can contact us (https://kdp.amazon.com/contact-us) to cancel this request.

To let your readers know your story will be removed, you can include an Author Note at the end of your episodes.

Quick reminder: You do not need to unpublish your Kindle Vella story to publish your story as an eBook. You can publish your Kindle Vella story after the last episode has been available to readers in the Kindle Vella store for at least 30 days. You can see the latest publication date for episodes on your Story Manager page.

To learn more about our content guidelines, check our Help:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G3DJY2Z5WSX5U6WL

Enjoy the rest of the week, Stay safe and have a pleasant day!

Thanks for using Amazon KDP,

Junaid

Interestingly, I guess you can put your story out as an ebook 30 days after the last episode posts--provided the idiots at Amazon actually know their own procedures, which clearly they don't.  I mean it took 4 people just to get 1 right email.  Why not then just let me hit a button and do it myself?  

I know some people are making money off of it, but I guess my readers are too cheap for it.  And that is in large part Amazon's fault.  The model of charging 1 token per 100 words makes stories too expensive versus regular books.  And there's no Kindle Unlimited thing to let people pay so much a month to read however much they want.

Then there's that people have to buy tokens up front.  If you want to string people along, that doesn't really work all that well.  It would be better to let them pay just a little to buy enough tokens for the next story.  And then a little more...and a little more...and a little more...until they've spent $15 to read a book that could cost $3 on regular Kindle.  But you can't do that when they have to make a minimum $2 purchase up front.  People see that $2 and they rightfully balk.  I mean, invest $2 in reading this story?  No way!  They might spend that precious $2 and not even use all those tokens and then they're up Shit Creek, aren't they?

(Meanwhile those same people probably think nothing of paying $1 or $2 for a candy hammer in Candy Crush to beat a troublesome level.  Or like me in Empire & Puzzles when I spend $1 or $3 to buy some gems to summon some worthless characters or buy something I need to level up characters.  I'm just saying that model might be skeevier, but it's much more profitable than up-front pricing.)

I think the advantage and disadvantage for Amazon is that they are big and sell traditional books.  The market share and brand familiarity is a bonus, but there's a downside too.  Because they sell traditional books and ebooks, that's what people using Amazon are accustomed to in a way that people using Wattpad or Dreame or whatever else aren't.  Amazon users might (rightfully) ask why they should use this and not just read a normal ebook?  Many are probably savvy enough to realize this isn't cheaper; if anything it's more expensive.

Thinking about it, even the name of this sucks.  "Vella," what the hell does that mean?  It's probably supposed to be short for novellas, but that doesn't really tell people what it is.  It's like when Netflix wanted to call their DVD rental service "Qwikster" or whatever; it might sound cool but it's meaningless.  They should rebrand it as "Kindle Serials" or something like that to give readers a better idea of what it's supposed to entail.

For people like me, I would say to give authors more discretion about pricing, eliminate the up-front pricing, and come up with a Kindle Unlimited thing so people can binge easier.  Or maybe let people pay a flat fee to unlock all the episodes of a story.  Instead of paying $2 for tokens, maybe let people pay $3 for a Binge Pass to read the entire series.  That would still be about the same price as a normal eBook, so readers might be more comfortable with that.  If they could make it so you could use real covers, that would be nice too.  These lame template covers kind of suck; it makes everything look cheap and lazy.

I'd love to know how other authors are doing but the only other person I know who's using it is Tony Laplume and he's such a pouty baby he won't talk to me. [eye roll]  I can see some potential in this format, but it still needs some tweaking.