Amazon launched a new publishing option a couple years ago called Vella. While they have the market basically cornered in eBooks, and are pushing out brick and mortar bookstores with their physical book sales, they’ve now decided to go after they pay-per-episode model of publishing.

Those of us that cut our fiction-writing teeth on sites like fanfiction.net and AO3 back in the early web days are familiar with this style of serialized episode release. Some posted episodes as soon as they finished writing them, with no proofreaders, betas, or editors to be seen. Most rarely saw much readership, and a very rare few somehow turned into lucrative book deals and major motion pictures (though some of those boggle my mind as to HOW).

The major difference between those sites and newer ones that Vella is modelled after, is that no money was ever required on AO3. People could upload anything, and it didn’t matter how old you were, because readers didn’t pay to read your stories, and you never got paid for uploading a thing. While the first 3 episodes of every story are free, Vella (like Wattpad or Tapas) requires readers to unlock the remainder of episodes using tokens purchased with real money. Each episode can be between 6 and 50 tokens to unlock (this breaks down to a token per 100 words written, so 600 to 5,000 words). Amazon will give you your first 200 tokens for free, but where other sites might let you earn more coins/ink/tokens/whatever by watching a video or downloading and playing so many levels of a mobile game, Vella’s tokens can only be earned with cash. (So far. It’s still in its infancy, so who knows what they’ll change in the coming years?)

I have a few author friends who’ve been publishing on Vella for a few months now, and they say that the pay is pretty good — but only if you’re getting bonuses every month. From what I’ve calculated out (and yes, I have a whole spreadsheet I made so I could figure out if it was worth it), the amount one could get paid per episode read (which is based on number of tokens purchased and how many tokens are used to unlock an episode – it’s a whole thing) is between 3 and 25 CENTS. And remember, the first 3 episodes of your story are 100% free to read, meaning you don’t get paid for those.

My thought process (which I found was the same for many authors first starting out on Vella) was that you’d want your episodes to be as long as possible in order to net you the highest possible royalty. Unfortunately, most readers on this platform prefer episodes to be between 20 and 25 tokens (or less, of course) since they’re only reading a chapter or so at a time. So, big ‘Oops!’ for me, since my very first Vella has episodes that average 33 tokens to unlock.

Like any other online publishing platform, engagement matters. So, being an unknown author AND new to Vella meant that trying to get even the tiniest bit of engagement relied heavily on my posting announcements about it everywhere I could. Not sure if you’ve seen my social media habits, but… I’m definitely lacking. So just about every day since my first chapter went live, I’ve been doing what my author friend recommended: play promo ‘games’ on Facebook in order to get any kind of activity.

[Side note here regarding these games: There are countless FB groups tailored to Kindle Vella authors and readers, and the intention is to help get the works found by the right readers and help the authors out, since discoverability on Vella is basically impossible. So what they do is post ‘games’ on their pages. You comment your direct story link, and in return, you read however much in other people’s stories as dictated by the original post. Sometimes free episodes count, sometimes only locked ones do. But in any case, you have to promote your story that way, or be banished to the depths of anonymity. It’s wonky, but it’s like 20 minutes of my day in the morning to deal with. As far as I know, I’ve only gotten 1 person to read the first 3 episodes of this story from somewhere outside of these games, and it was randomly through Twitter. *shrug*]

I just uploaded my final episode for my very first Vella, and it will go live on Saturday. In all, I chose to release episodes 2 episodes a week, and it only took a few weeks to get them all out. And since I launched it during the final week of June, my friend says that it’s likely that (even though I didn’t get any reads or likes, or any activity during that week) I’ll probably get a bonus of $5, just for starting a new title. She also stated that we get bonuses if we finish a title, if we update the story regularly, and (of course) get a lot of activity on the episodes. I won’t know officially what bonus I’ll receive for June until around the 20th of this month (which will only include my launching a new title), but the bonuses for July (which will include actual likes, reads, and follows, etc.) won’t be announced until around the 20th of August, so who knows if my efforts this past month have been worth it?

The good thing is, once the last episode is live, I can pull it from Vella (30 days after it goes live) and put it into actual book form, which I plan on doing. Might just do that for all my GPA titles.

-K