Bye-Bye Vella!

Another one of Amazon's bright ideas has bit the dust. Kindle Vella, their attempt at serialized fiction, has officially been cancelled.

Vella was launched at the end of May, 2021. It was Amazon's attempt to latch onto the serialized fiction made popular by platforms like Radish.

However, a number of things went wrong from the beginning. Amazon never really promoted the service, especially to the Gen Z consumers who love this stuff. They gamified the system where readers had to buy tokens in order to read scenes or chapters. Customers couldn't read the episodes on their Kindle devices or apps for the first two years Vella existed. And to top off the problems, the token system meant the readers were paying more for a story than they were for a 70-100K word novel.

Is Amazon losing touch with the average consumer? In a single word, yes. The average consumer is no longer Amazon's core customer. AWS, Amazon's computing division, makes far more money than the consumer goods division. The only reason the Amazon store still exists is because there's never enough money for rich men. They must have it all.

That same reasoning means the execs no longer have a real plan as far as books go. They're throwing things at the proverbial wall to see what sticks. "Hey, Radish is making money, so we should do this thing we don't understand, too!"

Um, no, that's not a business plan. That's guessing. It's definitely not a strategy.

For those of you who have Vella episodes you haven't read yet or have tokens you haven't spent yet, you've got until February 2025 to spend, download, and or read your purchases. (Amazon has not announced the specific date, so I'd do it before the 1st.)

After that, let's see what Amazon throws at the wall next.

More Amazon: Serials versus Novels

With Amazon's announcement about KDP Vella, a lot of writers are jumping into the serial world. But this is a little more complicated than chopping up a completed work into chunks.

Each episode of a serial story needs to be complete in and of itself while advancing the bigger story. My personal favorite would be comics, like the '80's runs of Chris Claremont on Uncanny X-Men and George Perez on Teen Titans and Wonder Woman.

Some folks think the filler episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural break the episodic rules, but most of the time, the episodes in question are meant to lighten the mood after several emotionally intense episodes or to highlight and expand a character who doesn't always get the spotlight.

Or you can look at it as the scenes between commercial breaks. Take the Star Trek: TOS episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles" for example.

The teaser and first scene start with the distress call from Space Station K9. The Enterprise arrives, but there's no real emergency, just a Federation bureaucrat with a stick up his butt. Captain Kirk agrees to post two security guards on the bins of wheat--sorry, quadratritcale--to help the station manager keep the damn bureaucrat happy. Kirk gives the crew shore leave, and everyone's happy.

Then the Klingons arrive.

No, they aren't here to attack, they just want a little shore leave, too. Bureaucrat goes crazy, but according to a treaty, they can't kick the Klingons off K9. So everybody's having a really nice time.

Until one really drunk Klingon picks a fight.

I could keep going, but you guys should get the drift. If not, break down the original Star Wars movie. It's structure is based on the movie serials shown during the '30's and '40's, like Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon, or Tarzan.

I stumbled across an article that does a very good job of analyzing the large story versus the episodic series a la Marvel shows versus the MCU. I can't comment on the Disney+ Marvel shows since I haven't watched them yet, but I do agree with the author's sentiments as far as Netflix's Luke Cage. Don't get me wrong because I loved that series. However, there was a couple of episodes I would have eliminated because they were neither a complete story in themselves and whatever they added to the overall arch could have been split between their bookend episodes.

If you're a writer planning to write a serial, but you haven't done so before, do a little research. The people that read serial stories are looking for a different experience than those that read novels. Wattpad is a good place to start, as is Radish.

I'm not against serial storytelling. In fact, I love it! All I'm saying is do your research before jumping into the Vella pool.

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.