Another Amazon Product - KDP Vella

This week, Amazon announced their new KDP Vella program. What is it? Well, it's a rip-off of the South Korean reading app Radish and the Candian reading website and app Wattpad. I'm going to stick with comparisons to Radish since it and Wattpad now have similiar structures, but Wattpad started mainly as a fanfic website.

For those who don't know what Radish is, it's a smartphone app that publishing serialized stories. It's a 21st version of the magazine and movie serialized tales going back to Charles Dickens and Buck Rogers. A reader buys tokens, and each episode costs X numbers of tokens. Writers get 50% of the pro-rated value of the cash value of all tokens bought in a particular month.

And Amazon has essentially copied all of Radish's terms. I know. I wasted the last two afternoons reading through and comparing them.

The thing is you can't just rip up a novel and publish it by chapters. Well, you can, but it may not be the best avenue for you. The episodes really do work a lot more like the old black & white Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials of the 30's and 40's.  There's a typical sequence: problem set-up, problem conplication, problem solution, and cliff-hanger intro for the next episode.

In fact, George Lucas followed the same basic set-up in the first two Star Wars trilogy. If you need a different genre, watch and break down Pretty Woman or the first season of Heroes TV show. Or check out any soap opera or telenovela.

Is KDP Vella worth it for writers? I don't know. I have a feeling income will be similar to KDP Unlimited. I think it will cost more for a reader in the long run. But Radish and Wattpad have made anticipation work for them.

Finally, I think it shows Amazon has reached maturity if they are following other companies now instead of leading the innovation. There were a lot of writers who used KDP Unlimited 1.0 as a serialized format when it started approximately seven years ago. However, Amazon intended KU to be a subscription service a la Scribed or the late Oyster. Amazon changed the terms a year later to KU 2.0, which paid per page read instead of per borrow. Otherwise, they would have created Vella six years ago.

Will I try it? I'm considering it, but the audience for the serialized phone stories are different than the audiences both Alter Ego and I currently have. I'd have to do subgenres neither names writes. If I change genres, I'm also considering a new pseudonym.

It'll be something I consider during the summer road trips to Texas to see Adorable Spawn.