Vella is Kindle’s serialized story community. If you’re familiar with Wattpad, it’s similar but no fan fiction allowed. (Another confession: I didn’t know Wattpad, but my kid did.) So I started wondering whether I had a story that would lend itself to serialization. I did. I do. It’s one that’s too long for most traditional zines but not long enough to be a novel. Seemed a good candidate for Vella.

That’s not to say I jumped in with both feet. I approached it like a math problem. $62,000 is a big number. 15 is not, but that’s how many prizes will be issued, many of them just a grand. Hey, I’d be thrilled to make a grand with my writing. There was a year when that happened once, but that was my Writers of the Future year when I got prize money and a pro rate for that story. And a trip. It was a big deal. But back to the math. I’m sure there will be thousands of people entering this contest, including the people that already post serials on Vella. So if I’m thinking of serializing a story for the prize money, that’s a longshot in a pipedream on Fat-Chance Island.

The Vellys aren’t going to be good for the writers. They’re going to be great for Amazon though. Think about it, $62,000 is a drop in the advertising budget bucket for them. That drop got my wife’s attention who got my attention. Now Amazon’s Kindle Vella is about to be inundated with new story serials. Lots of content is probably good for the brand, right? Unfortunately, that also means that finding a good story in the haystack is going to be that much harder. There’s no editorial process at play here. People who want to write put their stuff out a chapter at a time and it’s up to the consumer to sift through it and find something good. So yeah, good for Amazon, not so good for writers or readers.

Still, not so good doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Yes, the Vellys will bring a slew of writers and projects to Vella, but each of those writers will be raising awareness of Vella (like I am here), so potential readers increase. So maybe my story gets read by someone, right?

But what about money? Okay, that’s a tough one. Everything I’ve found suggests Amazon is operating Vella at a significant loss. For instance, I watched one video where a woman shared her recent months’ financials from Vella. She earned$4 in royalties through tokens (I’ll explain those shortly). Not a typo; four bucks. However, she didn’t just make four bucks that month. She got a bonus of several hundred dollars. Why? She didn’t know. Likely it was related to her posting frequency and free reads and back-catalog…but she couldn’t even trace a pattern from month to month when the bonus would rise and fall. All she was sure of was that she was averaging monthly bonuses in the hundreds. How old was that video? Er…I don’t remember. At least a couple years old, probably. So if I’m looking to make bank on monthly bonuses, that’s pretty unlikely. Maybe if I get a bunch of stories established I can expect some sort of consistent income from it, but my first story isn’t likely to pay out anytime soon.

Would I be better off just publishing it on Kindle as a novella? Maybe. On the upside, that’s still a possibility after the story is complete on Vella.

So how does all of this work? Well, the episodes are posted by the writer at whatever frequency they desire. Again, no real editorial oversight. Readers get to read the first ten (10) episodes for free. After that, it’s 10 tokens per episode. How much does a token cost? About a penny. Yup. You can get 100 tokens for 99 cents. [Click to see for yourself.] That puts a 20,000-word story (low-end novella length) at $2. Oops, we forgot the free episodes. Assuming a 1000-word episode, that’s a story for a buck. The writer earns half of that. A beefy 100,000-word novel devoured piecemeal like this would be nine bucks.

Pretty decent deal for the reader if the stories are good. That’s where this comes back to the writer’s benefit…kind of. Once a reader finds a diamond in the rough, the odds of them returning to that author seem excellent. So when sales are made, I’d anticipate high likelihood of the next story selling to the same reader. So can this be a way to cultivate fans? Hopefully. I feel like this could be especially beneficial for concepts that are incredibly niche (like steampunk fairytale retellings?) so a story can float to the top of certain categories more readily than it would for say urban romance or chosen one fantasy.

So the question arises: Do I try putting a story on Vella? This would be a pretty long post for a no, wouldn’t it? I just posted the first two episodes today.

This was a story I wrote for an anthology of steampunk fairytales, but it was rightly rejected by the editor (a good friend of mine). Why? I committed some cardinal sins of storytelling. For instance, you can’t have the train heist take place offscreen. Happily, the heist is now in there (around episode 10 or so) and I’m feeling really good about the story’s quality. My current plan is to drop episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays until the story is complete.

I don’t have any romantic hopes of prizes and windfalls (though I won’t turn them away). I ad run out of ideas as to what to do with this story. It was the first thing I thought of when I realized what Vella is. I reread it and found that the episodes were already fully formed in the structure of the story as scene breaks. For the most part, episodes will be between 1000 and 2000 words for a grand total of 14 episodes…maybe more. If this proves to be a positive experience, I bet I have some other pieces that would lend themselves to serialization as well. And of course I could write some with serialization in mind. At the moment, this is a big experiment for me. I’m eager to collect and analyze the results.

So if you enjoy steampunk stories and/or serialized stories, go check out “Godfather Death and the Amazing Diagnostic Machine”. If you’re steampunk-curious, it might prove a good place to dip in a toe. Same if you’re serial-curious. Remember, the first ten episodes are free. That’ll be over half the story for this one. If you enjoy it, please give it a like or a comment or a fave or…whatever the system is. (I’m still figuring this community out).