Kindle vella - what you need to know

If you haven’t yet heard, Amazon have just launched their new service for authors called Kindle Vella, this new service is currently available to authors in the US and allows you to publish books as one short episode at a time via the Kindle app.

So how does it work?

Your readers will be able to read the first few episodes of your book for free and after this they’ll buy tokens to unlock the other episodes, the number of tokens needed to unlock an episode is deemed by the word count of the story (the more words, the more tokens needed to unlock). Kindle will sell tokens as packs, so your readers can use them as and when they need to.

Royalties are 50% of what the read spends on the tokens to unlock your episode.

Kindle Vella is making it easier for interactions, readers can follow stories they’re interested in, ‘crown’ a favorite story (this will get featured in the Vella store), they can also give your story a ‘thumbs up’ and authors can add ‘notes’ to give additional insights and thoughts around the story.

The format is aimed at being a serial reading experience, so, your Kindle Vella stories cannot be incorporated into a long format version (you can’t turn it into a book without unpublishing it from Kindle Vella). Also, you can’t turn an existing book into a serial format – even if you have unpublished the book.

You can access the Kindle Vella service through your existing KDP account, from the account’s ‘bookshelf’ you’ll see the link to go to Kindle Vella, from here you’ll see a very easy to follow set up page, you’ll add your title, name, story image (this has to be 1600x1600 pixels, either as a TIFF or JPEG and without and text upon it), select the relevant category for your story and add tags (to help people find it easier).

Uploading your story can be done using either DOC or DOCX formats, you can even write the episode on the set-up page itself, formatting itself is a little basic, you are limited to just bold, italics and underlines, there is also a limit on word count too, the range is currently stories between 600-5000 words only (but again, this is meant for you to publish books as short episodes and one at a time.

To see more, check out the Kindle Vella page and also view Amazon’s short video explaining the service further.

Let us know what you think about Vella and will you be using it in the comment section below.