As an author, I try to keep up with current trends, topics, and marketing methods. One of the newest is Kindle Vella a way to engage younger readers and those on cellular devices. My (now adult) children are voracious readers but prefer free serials and fanfiction available on numerous aggregator sites. My son lamented the demise of his phone because he lost the thousand browser tabs he had up to catch updates on all his favorite stories.
Three Reasons I Tried Vella
1. Direct Connection with Fans
Many people comment on the ongoing threads. I liked the idea of real-time feedback on a story as I write. Even Brandon Sanderson and Lawrence Watt-Evans have enacted similar mechanisms with their fans. Marketing only through e-mail feels cold and distant.
2. Lower Upfront Cost
To collect the 5-10,000 email addresses I need to build and communicate to a core audience would run me around $1200 a year. Editing prices have shot up to $1200 a novel and cover costs are about $275 each, even if I didn't like the results. Copyright is not $65 a novel. With advertising for the releases, he grand total comes to about $2100 a book. The price to post on Vella is about $25 for a cover image on Etc.
3. Getting in on the Ground Floor of the Next Big Thing
I succeeded in e-books when they first came out. This could be a great opportunity. Two years should have been enough time to work the kinks out of the platform. Right? In theory, the author gets 1 cent per 200 words of story sold, plus bonuses.
Reasons I Dropped Vella after a Month
1. As of January 2023, Amazon Doesn't Pay Authors for Free Tokens
Hundreds of people could read your story, but if they used their initial 200 free tokens, you don't see a cent. My counts of episode unlocked would be up one day and retroactively zeroed out the next. Here's the trick: authors can't prove which reads were free. You have to trust Amazon. I don't after funny business with audible and an audiobook. Even if you manage to get the unicorn bonuses, they won't pay for two months.
2. Vella only usable through Kindle Devices
The Kindle app on my phone can't actually read Vella stories, and none of my 600 e-book fans were interested in the Vella. What about reaching new readers? The "discover" button for Vella will only recommend 25 stories, plus a list of their big money makers and a few new/trending. The scrolling search is difficult on a phone or other small device. Only two covers are visible at a time. If you read it on a PC, the episodes appear in a popup limited to 2.5" wide, not conducive to binge reading.
3. No Good Way for Readers to Find You
Since you can't do Amazon ads for Vella, Facebook groups are the only viable was to advertise. The groups that aren't closed are composed almost entirely of new authors. The idea is that each day, you join events to read and like/follow other people's episodes in hopes that someone will do the same for you. To do so honestly takes a lot of time. In a week of effort on one group, I accrued 21 likes. Most successful authors belong to 6 such groups. Given that members of the recommended list average 10,000 likes, you would need to spend full time accumulating these for 80 weeks to show up on those reliably. However, this is completely artificial, not organic reader response. For uncrowned sagas, the ratio of likes to actual reviews is abysmal, on the order of one in 500. With e-books, the ratio between read and reviewed is closer to 1 in 25. You also have to spend real money to gain these likes, while other authors might not. Also, you are not allowed to criticize other authors' work in any way, even to tell them they have missing/duplicate punctuation or other typos in episode one.
How could readers find you organically? The initial categories like frequently updated only show two covers/titles at a time with no text. Each of the 16 categories have around 1000 entries displayed in the browsing, with the addition of 2 of the 7 tags you chose. However, the most popular categories I wrote in have far more competition.
Fantasy 11,525
Romance 15,500
These aren't ordered by any rhyme or reason I could find.
4. Poor Quality for the Money
The presentation could be the same as the Kindle e-reader, but they use a cheaper, clunkier interface with no indentation that ruins scene breaks. The import function doesn't check spelling like the e-book upload either. The average quality of the 100+ episodes I sampled was low, filled with grammar errors and repetition. I only liked about one story in ten. Just one story so far merited a review. In that case, the author stretched a single scene over four 600-word episodes--agonizing. Even with the crowned suggestions, the cream of the crop, the most frequent rating is 3 stars. In the rare instance they complete a season, say 100 episodes 1000 words each, a reader would spend $9.70 for the raw unedited product. For the same e-book, polished, they would spend from 99 cents to $3.99.
Conclusion
While Vella may become a viable platform for new authors some day, it's not soup yet. I added updates every other day for a month and then stopped. By May 28th, I'll be ready to post the e-book.
Addendum
A month later, I still have $0 in royalties (despite several days where the dashboard briefly showed sales). However, I did get an email from Amazon saying that I have a $25 bonus which will be paid out in a couple months for my high March sales. Huh?
