Month: August 2024

How’s the Vella thing going?

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t been following along with my Kindle Vella story, you should know that episode 10 goes live today (as soon as it clears the KDP copyright checks). The tenth episode is a big milestone for two reasons: 1) it’s the last of the free episodes, and 2) that’s the episode minimum for the Velly Awards. Ten free episodes means you’re getting over 16,000 words for free! Those words bring us to the precipice of a major event that will drastically change the dynamic between Katrine and her godfather. Trust me, you’ll be ready to shell out the coins for episode 11 to see what happens next.

I’d be lying if I said “Godfather Death and the Amazing Diagnostic Machine” was tearing up the charts on Vella. With the Vellys prizes in play, I’m sure there are a lot of new stories to choose from, from both new and established serial writers. As word spreads, though, I expect GDatADM to catch on. Steampunk isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but this one is a good brew if it is your sipping preference.

I’ve tried some new things with this story. Serializing is new to me. Vella has made the process of posting episodes pretty simple. I really feel like GDatADM lent itself well to the format due to natural breaks at intervals of between 900 and 1500 words. Sometimes that break is a scene change or time skip, while others it’s a dramatic pause ideal for some cliffhanger anticipation.

The book trailer was also new to me. I enjoyed that process a lot and I’m pretty proud of the result, though the audio could have been smoother (especially that first syllable). I put some money into boosting that ad’s signal on Facebook, more as an experiment than anything else. After all, I have to not only sell my story with the ad but sell people on Kindle Vella as well. The ad run is over after garnering 1.3k views. Not a ton, but I restricted the audience by education (high school grad+) and interest (reading).

Click to see the trailer.

The big question: did those ad views turn into readers? The big answer: No.

Let’s start by examining what the ad does on Facebook. It seems that clicking on the ad opened a Facebook Messenger dialog between my writer account and the clicker. It opened the dialog with a bottled message from me to them. Several people seemed confused by that. The most common message I received was some version of “who are you?” I also got a number of bot messages, like “Do you offer goods or services?” Maybe that was how I set it up. If I try it again, I’ll pay more attention to checkboxes during ad setup.

I did get a couple contacts that seemed to be people genuinely interested in the story. I responded to those, but not the bots or the “who are you” contacts. As far as I can tell, even those didn’t yield readers.

I get the feeling that I’ll have a hard time pulling in new Vella customers. I’ll need to explore what it takes to boost my signal through Kindle Vella. I suspect the $50 I’ve already spent on this ad exceeds any money I’ll ever see back from this story. That wasn’t really the point. I wanted to see what scope a low-priced ad afforded. I now know more so I can more intelligently use this tool should I release a self-published book. I’ll probably release GDatADM as a book (digital and/or print) once the Vella exclusivity period ends. I could change the ad pretty easily to redirect shoppers. That might prove more successful. Might.

As far as serialization goes, it’s been a good way to publish this story. I’ve made a lot of little changes right before posting, despite the story having been done for a long time. Most stories – especially novella length and shorter – are written to maximum wordcounts, so not everything that needs words gets them. The episodic delivery tends to reward the extra length since the episode’s value will feel greater. It also helps me focus on just a thousand words or so at a time and making sure that thousand is polished to a shine. The only significant rewrite is coming at the very end (episodes 14-15), where I’ve never quite been thrilled with the resolution, probably part of the (subconscious) reason I’d never tried to self-publish it before. Word count got me on the first writing and that ending never recovered. Tune in in a couple weeks to see how I do with it.

While the Kindle Vella experience has not yet proven to be the future promised by my “Writers of the Future” win over a decade ago, it hasn’t been a waste. It’s been a while since any of my work has been available commercially. It was time to get myself back out there. Now to get some eyes on it…