Earlier this week while in a Facebook publishing group I came across an announcement for Kindle Vella. It sparked my interest so over the past couple of days I’ve been looking for more of an explanation about what this entails. This morning Amazon updated the Kindle site where we authors manage our book sales.

Currently, readers can buy paperbacks or Kindle ebooks. If they are on a budget they can also subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and read as much as they want for a monthly fee, or they can read via Prime Reading. Now Amazon will be adding Vella in the next few months.

Vella is a service where readers will buy tokens to use to read the individual episodes of serial books released on this new platform. The details are still coming out, but this sounds a lot like Radish Fiction. I was recruited to write for the Radish Select program back in 2018 and I wrote a few serial fiction stories for them at that time.

Here’s an example of what Kindle Vella might look like on an iPhone.

I see Vella as a way for Amazon to attract younger readers. Think of someone on a bus, in an Uber, or on a break between college classes. They can go into the app and use a few tokens to read more of the story they’ve been following.

Right now it sounds like it will be a 50/50 split of proceeds between the author and Amazon.

One interesting feature is that there will be a way for authors to interact with their readers in the Vella App.

I’m still looking at the details of Vella and deciding whether this might be something I want to do. One thought is to start with a new Science Fiction story I’ve been writing and see how that goes. It seems like the best genres for this new platform would be young adult, fantasy, and maybe romance.

Stay tuned and I’ll tell you more about Kindle Vella as I uncover it.

Feel free to comment about Vella. What do you think? Is this something you’d want to use to read on the go?