Kindle Vella is shutting down
See how not surprised I am
So, we got the news just after Halloween that Amazon is shutting down Kindle Vella in February 2025. What’s Kindle Vella? It’s Amazon KDP’s serial fiction platform. What? You didn’t know they had that? You’re not alone.
Vella sounded like a great idea. A part of one of the largest, if not the largest, book sellers where people can post their work in a serial format. One chapter at a time, every week, 2 weeks, whatever. And readers would buy tokens to unlock chapters based on word count. Authors, in return, would receive a percentage of those tokens used to unlock their work plus a monthly bonus depending on engagement.
Well…
They launched it, sent out a few messages to writers to entice them to join and then… didn’t really do anything else with it. It was never open outside the United States. Commenting was limited at best. And, they never seemed to promote it themselves. And then 3 years go by and they wonder why it never took off!
Jinkies! It’s a mystery!
Except it’s not.
And, so, when I got the email that they were shutting down, I actually laughed. On a live. My viewers on Twitch got my live reaction.
Anybody out there who has something to sell will tell you it doesn’t happen without promotion. And, I don’t know what Amazon expected. We’re already exhausted trying to promote our work. They have how much money at their disposal? The Vella portion of their site was, last time I tried to use it, clunky and a bit confusing.
And we tried. So many of my writing friends wanted this to work and we tried to cross promote each other like crazy. But, it was never enough.
I pulled my work a long time ago off that platform. So, you can check out my LinkTree if you want to see where some of it is now. I’m keeping my options open for my medieval inspired fantasy while I try to do some significant revisions and finish writing the series.
Maybe Amazon will come up with something else. But, I will be wary of it from now on.