You may have noticed that my artist butt has been blathering a lot about stuff like “Kindle” and “Publishing” and “Mothman erotica” lately. (Not that last one? Scrub it from your eyes.) I apologize if all that seems like a big ol’ pivot.
It ain’t, though.
I’ve been writing my own comics and blog posts this whole time. And a novel, and some other things. It’s no coincidence that my favorite people to work with are authors. I’ve been writing as much as I’ve been drawing, pretty much forever. And shall continue to do so. But these days, I figured I should also probably PUT IT SOMEWHERE.
Once I made this decision, I had to decide the following things:
When should I use a pen name?
Chase traditional publishers, or self publish?
Where should I publish first?
How do I publish something on that platform?
How do I tell people about it?
Do I stick to one place or go wide?
How does this work for different book types (eBook, paperback, comic book)
This is going to be a monster post. If you’re not morbidly curious about all things publishing, TURN BACK NOW.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s go through each point.
So first off, here’s Kindle Vella. In two weeks, I will be launching my novel The Cradle of the Worm on there and updating it twice a week through May 2024. …NOW WHAT THE HECK IS A VELLA.
I’m pretty sure “Vella” comes from the world novella, since the idea here is bite-sized reading. Vella was launched in April 2021 and it’s Amazon’s place to read serial or episodic fiction. Some folks take a completed novel and release each chapter one at a time on there, as episodes. Other folks write big long series of hundreds of chapters’ length which might later be published as several novels in a series.
searching and discoverability
As you can see at a glance, Kindle Vella is very romance heavy and it’s not set up for you to use a search bar and find specific authors or titles. Instead, it’s all about browsing the provided categories and the featured series. (You can use your Amazon search bar up top, but I’ve heard it’s kind of hit or miss.) While romance is king (queen?) on Vella, you can find everything from science fiction to nonfiction on there.
vella Pricing: is it a good deal to read by the chapter?
The other thing to know about Vella is these little dudes in the top right of your page.
Those little golden keys are “tokens” and that’s how everybody pays for each chapter. You get 200 free tokens to start out with when you try Vella out. A token is about one cent, so that’s about 2 bucks worth of tokens. Vella is only available to Americans right now, so I very much mean 2 dollars. One token gets you about 100 words, so an episode that’s 800 words will cost you 8 cents to read, and an episode that’s 2,000 words will cost you 20 cents to read. The first 3 episodes are always free on every series.
I calculated that my novel The Cradle of the Worm would come in at between $6 and $7 USD total to read on Vella. This is a good value when stacked up against the average Kindle book being between about $10 and $18, but it’s high compared to a Kindle book that goes on sale for $2.99.
why should you read on vella?
I personally think you should read on Vella, or Tapas, or Radish, or Wattpad, or whatnot, if you like the format. On Vella specifically there’s a few interesting little reader mechanics like getting one “crown” a week to award to your favorite story, and the option to answer polls and chat with authors in the comments under each chapter. These are things I really like about Tapas as well.
Alternately, you might like to read a novel earlier than its release as a kindle book or printed book. And of course, maybe an author you love has a Vella-exclusive series or something. To me those would all be valid reasons.
I won’t be trying to get anyone to “buy into the platform” though. My goal has always been to give my readers, just like my art customers, a variety of ways to get my stuff so they could choose the one they like best. Making them use one platform or another (or even asking them to) kind of goes against that. For that reason, anything I release on Vella will be made into an eBook afterwards.
why am I writing on vella?
I’ve got 5 reasons.
Fun interface. Vella is actually a pretty clean, easy interface for me to use for the WRITING part. Now, it has the typical Amazon update and review process nightmares. But insofar as uploading your story, making a poll and writing an author’s note, it’s really enjoyable. I think it’s actually FUN.
Forcing better writing. Vella is forcing me to finally do the final edit on The Cradle of the Worm, and really consider it from the point of view of a READER. Am I being confusing? Boring? Redundant? Too much exposition? Too little? This is the most critical and intentional I’ve been with my writing so far. I want to keep that up.
Inspiration. The episodic format actually made me think of a lot of other stories I’d enjoy making into novels or novellas. I always thought that I was going to be a “one and done” author with Cradle of the Worm, but for the first time in a very long time I’m full of new stories.
Readers. Now, rumor has it that most of the readers on Vella are my fellow authors. (I’ll go into that more below.) But authors are readers too. I’m an author and guess what I love to do? Read. So frankly, even if I only ever get my first 3 FREE chapters read by 1 little “organic reader,” or an author or two I spoke to in a Vella Author group, that’s immensely more than the zero readers I am currently sitting at.
Having to learn to do writer stuff. Since discoverability on Vella is so dreadful for authors, I’ve had to learn all kinds of things about promotion and self-publishing to even think about doing a Vella series. And since I knew it was going to be an eBook after that, I had to learn even MORE things about how to promote and publish eBooks. I find few things more absorbing than learning, so it’s been a pretty exciting process.
about that rumor you mentioned though?
There are all sorts of rumors swirling around Vella online. Is Vella dead? Did it get abandoned before it even launched? Will it be the next big thing? Will they improve searchability or promote it more? Will they pull it in 2024? Are there any “real” organic readers on there, or is it all authors reading each other?
As you can see from my current series I’m reading “How to Vella” by Rachel Messerschmidt, I’m doing my best to learn everything, of course. But in my experience, business guys don’t tell you what they’re doing until they’ve already done it. So I can’t answer any of those questions.
According to all the wild conjecture there’s a chance, however small, that Vella might close down before my series even launches on February 5, 2024. My readers would be fine since I would always make sure you had a copy of my eBook if that happened, but who knows otherwise.
And if it doesn’t close down, I can’t even send you guys to a page until that day because the only way authors can point readers to a story is with a direct link to their series. There is no such thing as a Vella Author Page, and my Vella series won’t populate to my Amazon Author Page until they’re live. For this reason, some authors find their Vella stories to be insanely hard to promote. And Amazon isn’t pushing the platform very hard.
if it’s that iffy, why even bother?
As an author, I’m bothering because of the 5 reasons above. Even if my current plan falls through, I’ll have a much better edit of The Cradle of the Worm to put on Kindle (and elsewhere), and I’ll know WHY I’m publishing my work, and WHAT I want to do with it. That alone has been worth it.
As a reader, I suspect it would be fun to go grab your free 200 tokens, raid everybody’s free chapters, and see if you find anything cool to read. At least, that’s my plan.
If 3 chapters of free Mothman erotica doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.
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After taking an intensive 3 day creator accelerator class through the Indiana Arts Commission, and then subsequently getting started on The River People (funded in part by them), I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that my existing system of comic delivery was EXTREMELY slapdash and unsatisfactory.
So, I took several days and mapped out my intentions. It’s important to me that my comics be forever free to read. However, people also buy digital downloads and paper copies of them. I want them to keep doing so, it’s a big help. But while my printed comics have something past my free comics to offer, my digital downloads didn’t really have much to distinguish them from my free comics.
I took a big chunk of time and found a lot of cool art and writings which were not on the internet, and crafted that into bonus pages for my digital downloads. Then I innocently skipped over to Comixology Submit, as I had in days of yore, to begin the process of changing my comic book file.
Sandpaperdaisy Art 