Welp, I (wearing my Nicola hat) have dipped my toe into the brand new world that is Kindle Vella. For those who have never heard of this, it’s Amazon’s platform for selling serialized fiction where the reader pays tokens to read each chapter. Kind of like Wattpad, only monetized.

So why am I doing this? Mainly as an experiment—some writers have done extremely well on Vella, making as much as $2K a month. Others have gotten no traction whatsoever. From what I understand a lot depends on having an absolutely dependable release schedule, and ideally releasing at least two chapters (or episodes) a week.

But Mel, I hear you ask, you write novels. Why are you doing serialized fiction? Ah, that’s where the magic is. Y’see, you can also publish chapters of the book you’re working on as long as they’re clean and edited, and you don’t have to have the entire thing done. Once you are finished, you can take the episodes down thirty days after you’ve published the last one, then compile them into a book and publish that in e and print form.

I must say, this is also good story crafting process for me. In order to lure a reader from one episode to the next the story has to be attention-grabbing, thoroughly entertaining, and ideally have a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of each episode. Which can only benefit the overall plot of the story. Plus I used to do this all the time when I wrote fanfic so serialized fiction feels very familiar to me.

Do I think I’m going to make money at this? Hell if I know—that’s why I’m considering it an experiment. The worst thing that will happen is nobody pays to read my eps, I finish the book and post the last ep, spend the thirty-day waiting period polishing everything and setting up a pre-order, then release the completed book to a waiting audience who wants to read this. Basically, it’s a win-win situation for me.

Let’s see how it goes…