Kindle Vella: Pros and Cons
A review of the new Amazon writing platform
On July 13, 2021, Amazon launched a new serialized story platform called Kindle Vella. As a published author through Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), Amazon notified me in April of the upcoming rollout and invited me to prepare a story for the launch. This has been my experience on the platform for the first month since it went live in the US.
How the platform works
Before I discuss the pros and cons, let me first explain how the platform works. Kindle Vella is a serialized story platform, where readers can read a story in a series of episodes. They provide the first three episodes for free, to entice readers and get them invested in the story. After that, readers can unlock more episodes through the payment of tokens (more on that later).
From the writer’s side, they set the interface up so we can post one episode of our story at a time, and schedule when they release. The release schedule is entirely our choice, so we can either release all episodes at the same time, or we can tease our readers and release them daily, every other day, weekly, and so on.
The interface limits formatting for these stories to only bold, italics, and underline, so there isn’t as much fuss as there is with formatting an…
