I’ve mentioned in passing that my Raygun Romance will be available on the Kindle Vella platform, which is set up for serialized fiction. Rather than a traditional novel, this story will be published as a series of short stories, with their individual “acts” (usually 3 to 5) released weekly. But why use Vella?
The answer is simple: I want less competition.
Currently, the regular Kindle Store is oversaturated; if you want to be noticed at all, your ad spend, keyword game, mailing list, and social media have to be on point. It’s a hard slog to be seen, and the risk of sinking into obscurity is great indeed.
However, because Vella is new, there is far less competition, and what competition there is cannot simply republish old work. It is said that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity; because I wrote this serial last year, I was ready for Vella from day one. Chances like this are once in a lifetime, and I would be foolish to pass it up.
But Vella has created a vexing problem for me: It excludes non-US users.
At launch, Vella will only be available to readers and authors in the US, and all stories must be in English. Furthermore, Vella can only be accessed via iOS or Amazon’s own website. This means that readers elsewhere are completely left out. While I do expect this policy to change eventually, it pains me that I cannot release the story globally from the start. While I would like to help any non-US readers, my options are extremely limited. That said, I owe non-US readers a solution, and I’ll post it once I have one.
With all that in mind, I will announce the title of the story tomorrow.
