My Experience With Kindle Vella

Recently, I posted the final chapter of The Perils of Sasha Reed; thus, there are no plans to post more stories in this series, and it has been marked as complete. and would like to reflect on how Kindle Vella has treated me as a platform. I started this experiment with high hopes; let’s see if those expectations have been met.

The Good

Vella doesn’t require elaborate novel-style covers; a simple image will do to indicate your story. For that reason, I commissioned an image of the main character being kidnapped, since that is the central premise of the stories.

Every month, I have been receiving bonuses based on the activity on the stories — likes, follows, reads, the whole nine yards. These bonuses are surprisingly generous, and even a little bit of activity on the stories gives me something.

The Bad

Time for some cold, hard truth: As of this post, no one read all of the available chapters. One person read to Act III of “The Old Homeland” (the third story), and absolutely no one went any farther. While I have seen several complaints that Amazon doesn’t promote Vella much, I think that this may simply be due to my writing ability; I couldn’t hold an audience enough to make them spend tokens and read the rest of my work. “Make them spend tokens” is important because the free reads turned out far better. “Raid on the Racetrack” is available free of charge in its entirety, and here, 26% of readers who started the first chapter read that story to completion.

Second has to do with the bonuses. The monthly bonuses, while helpful, may not be reliable in the future. My bonuses are generous because Vella has only been active for two months and some change, so there aren’t as many authors to divide the pot with. However, as more authors join Vella, my slice is likely to decrease.

Lastly, as of this post, Vella is only available to US authors and readers. If it were up to me, I would have released Sasha Reed globally; however, I wanted to get in on the ground floor while it was still new, so I accepted the conditions. Someday, I’ll release Sasha Reed in a globally available format.

Conclusion

Even though I have misgivings, I will stick with Vella for the time being. Maybe it’s because I got in early, which allowed me to get high bonuses, but I’m making some money off of this. I want to see what happens with the bonuses so that I can see if it’s worth it to stay on the platform. But right now, things have been okay.

Now go read The Perils of Sasha Reed right now!