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…
Closing in on finishing Throw Quilt #2—I’ve got it sandwiched and basted, and now I just have to get it quilted which should only take two days or so. With any lucky I’ll have that done and the edges bound by Wednesday night, then I can get both quilts in the mail to their new owner.
I am happy to announce that the S’mores ice cream is a hit. Lyndon took a spoonful, his eyebrows went up and he said, “Oh, that’s very nice,” which in British means, “Damn, this is delicious!”
Look upon me in awe, mortals, for I have doing All the Adulting. I have:
Because I really don’t have the capacity to do any sort of super fancy quilting on anything larger than a baby quilt I decided to go with a plain old cross hatch quilting on the Arkansas Rainbow wall hanging. Since the block pattern is a Log Cabin one, it looks fantastic and quilts the piece nicely without overwhelming the design. I finished the last of it tonight and I’ll put the border on tomorrow, toss it in the wash, then put it up in our room (there’s wall space on Lyndon’s side of the bed that has been empty since we moved in because I’ve been waiting to find the right piece of art to put there. Well, now I’ve found it).
Let’s be honest, writers spend a lot of time sitting. Yeah, some of them have standing or even walking desks (and I have no idea how those folks manage to walk and type at the same time—I’d fall over within the first thirty seconds), but the bulk of us nail butt to chair while we’re churning out our wordage.
As of last night I finished the swing dress I’d started a couple of years ago. I’d already cut out all the pieces, but things happened so it got stuffed in the closet along with two other batches of fabric I’d bought to make two other dresses in the same pattern.
Now I LOVE swing dresses. They look great on me, and I have three or so of them from Torrid, but when I found this awesome skulls and roses fabric I knew I wanted to make a swing dress out of it (and prove that the pattern would work on my body so that I could make more if I wanted to).
There’s nothing quite as special as climbing into a perfectly clean bed that smells great, snuggling down to sleep … and suddenly your brain treats you to a 3-D presentation on all the things that could go disastrously wrong in the near future.
Melanie Fletcher 