About Kindle Vella: Amazon’s New Serialized Book Publishing Platform
Did you know about Amazon’s new launch, Kindle Vella? Yeah, many people didn’t. Here is a detailed explanation of the platform, its potential, and what could be coming next.
Kindle Vella is currently in a soft launch phase for the public, but as of this writing, any author that actively publishes on KDP (Amazon’s independent publishing platform) can set up their books before the larger marketing push.
Being first to market is valuable, so if you are an author or an active writer on platforms like Wattpad, the best time to get in is now.
Note: As this serialized writing platform is still developing and may change, the information shared in this article was written on July 18th, 2021. If I update any information, I’ll add more to this disclaimer for future readers.
In this article we will cover:
- What is Kindle Vella?
- How do authors earn money on Kindle Vella?
- What are Kindle Vella tokens and how much do they cost?
- What is the difference between Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Vella?
- What books are eligible for Kindle Vella?
- Kindle Vella book exclusivity, explained
- Kindle Vella book features for community building
- How to upload your book to Kindle Vella
- Kindle Vella read-through tips
- The future of Kindle Vella
What is Kindle Vella?
Kindle Vella is a serialized reading experience, where readers pay for each chapter or part of the serialized novel. What does serialized mean? Simply, something updated over time.
Kindle Vella is a separate store experience, located here. Books will also show up in Amazon book searches.
There are two different schools of thought on how often to update your book on Kindle Vella. Some authors are adding one chapter per week (more true to the serial idea) and other authors uploading a whole book at once so readers can binge buy and get that gratification of completing a book all in a few days.
David Naggar, CP of Books and Kindle Content at Amazon, is in favor of slow updates over time. He said —
“We designed Kindle Vella as a mobile-first experience because we know readers are becoming more and more interested in stories that can be read quickly on their phones. At the same time, readers want the connection that you get from reading a story or author for a long period of time.”
How do you earn money on Kindle Vella?
Authors are paid when a reader reads a chapter using paid tokens.
Authors are not paid for the three free preview episodes (available for all books) or the 200 free tokens that Amazon is giving readers to try to program. Authors are only giving a portion of the profit for paid token reads.
The explanation provided by Amazon:
(Number of Tokens to unlock episode) * (Tokens bundle price/# Tokens in bundle — taxes and fees) * (50% rev share) = Earnings per episode
For example, here’s how we calculate earnings for a 3,025 word episode (30 Tokens) when the Tokens are purchased on the web in a 200 Tokens bundle versus an 1,100 Tokens bundle. In this example, we are assuming no taxes or fees.
Episode purchased with 200 Tokens bundle: 30 Tokens * ($1.99/200 Tokens — 0) * 50% = $0.1493
Episode purchased with 1,100 Tokens bundle: 30 Tokens * ($9.99/1100 Tokens — 0) * 50% = $0.1362
Sounds more complicated than it needs to be, right? Essentially, you are splitting the royalty 50/50 with Amazon.
This is different than publishing a book on KDP, where royalties are either 35% or 70% on eBook (depending on your markup) and 60% for paperback.
What is the difference between Kindle Unlimited vs Kindle Vella?
Consumers spend $10 a month on their Kindle Unlimited subscription and they can read any book enrolled in the program. Regardless of if they read 10 books or one book, it costs only $10.
On Kindle Vella, readers have to buy tokens to read novels. The number of tokens per episode depends on the amount of words per episode/chapter. I am seeing most chapters range between 10–20 tokens. You can’t upload an episode that is fewer than 600 words or longer than 5,000 words.
How much do Kindle Vella tokens cost?
Pricing for tokens is detailed below, as of July 18, 2021.
What books are eligible for Kindle Vella?
It is an entirely separate platform/bookshelf/library from the books you currently have on Amazon KDP. You cannot press a button to upload a KDP book to Kindle Vella. In fact, you shouldn’t.
Books already published in KDP or other long-form platforms cannot be used in Kindle Vella.
To have a book on Kindle Vella, it must be a new book not published anywhere else. Above is a complete novel available on KV called Becoming Wolf. You’ll note that instead of a full book cover, Amazon uses circular book covers.
Kindle Vella Book Exclusivity, Explained
Books on KV cannot be published somewhere else in long-form content (as a book) or available for free anywhere, including your website or newsletter. It must be original and unpublished work.
Once you have shared your chapters onto Kindle Vella, you cannot publish them in a book format for at least 30 days. This rule is by each chapter's publish date.
For example, if you want to create a “part one” for the book (for example, with a bind-up of chapters 1–10 out of 30 published) that is available to purchase on Kindle or even as a paperback, you can’t do that until at least 30 days after chapter 10 was published. Even if you published chapter 30 yesterday, you can still share other chapters if they were uploaded more than 30 days ago.
However, paid systems like Patreon are excluded as they are similar to serials (one post could conceptually by one episode). Authors can publish their work on Patreon and Kindle Vella at the same time. This was discussed recently in the Kindle Vella forums.
Kindle Vella Features for Community Building
A unique feature to Kindle Vella is the Author’s Notes. You can grow your community by sharing behind the scenes for the episode/chapter in a way that is not available for regular eBooks.
Even on Wattpad, when you put an Author Note (often called A/N) it does not have a unique formatting set as it is simply added into the chapter and not delineated in any way. It’s easy to skip an A/N on Wattpad, where on Kindle Vella these notes stand out.
Example author note sharing a BTS and personal message from the author:
Readers can like/thumbs up the chapter they are reading if they recommend it (adding to the book's total thumbs-ups and helping its rankings), follow the story to get notified of updates, favorite one book per week, and share the story online as word of mouth.
When an author uses tags to describe their book, readers can click through those tags to find similar stories in the genre.
What does a crown mean on Kindle Vella covers?
Amazon allows all paid readers to favorite one book per week. Amazon uses a “Top Faved” list instead of a bestseller list. Readers can also follow stories but they cannot yet comment on chapters like on Wattpad.
How to Upload to Kindle Vella
Sign on to your author account on KDP (or set one up) and then click on the banner at the top that introduces Kindle Vella.
Once on this page, you will set up the introductory elements of your story like your cover, author name, title, summary, and tags. From there, you upload and format your episode one chapter at a time by copying and pasting rather than uploading a Word or PDF file.
Kindle Vella Tips for Increasing Read Through Rates
- Have a compelling cover that tells a story or theme in a circular format.
- Make sure chapter titles, first paragraph, and last paragraph have something that compels readers to click “read next episode.”
- Update chapters on a schedule and let readers know the schedule. No one wants to spend money on a story that may be “abandoned” so being consistent helps readers trust and follow your story more readily.
- Use the Author Notes feature to let your readers know your personality, give sneak peeks of what is to come, and give behind the scenes. Make it juicy enough that they never skip it.
In the Reports Central beta, you will be able to see how many readers move from the first three episodes s to then buy the next using their tokens.
The Future of Kindle Vella
The success of Kindle Vella is still up in the air with many updates to the platform likely coming soon as they move through this soft launch.
More interactive features will likely be coming to Kindle Vella so it can live up to the mobile-first interactive experience it is billed as. One popular feature I’m betting on is reader comments both within and at the end of the story, like on Wattpad, as that has added to the viral and meme-like content to the reading experience.
What do you think of Kindle Vella so far? Will you be exploring or publishing on this new Amazon platform?
