Firstly, the deity of book distribution with its subscription membership that just sent its owner to space isn't a machine I want to work against me.

But isn't that how it always goes?

The small fish swallowed, consumed, overwhelmed by the big fish. You almost feel like you're drowning as you watch already famous authors gain more notoriety with a platform you just knew was going to be your ticket to greatness.

I hopped on Kindle Vella as an author without taking it in as a reader. It doesn't connect to your personal kindle account. You can't open stories in Kindle apps or readers, all of the stories have to be navigated through the web browser.

That's not the nail in the coffin for me tho. Pennies on the page can hurt or help you as an author. If it's a really great story, folks will spend the cash to finish. However, even if the story is great, if the math doesn't math right, readers end up spending nearly triple the amount they would had they bought the ebook or paperback version of your serial.

Let's talk dollars and cents. It's alright, you get your cut as long as readers are tuning in to new episodes. I don't have any complaints about the royalty payments or sign-on bonuses. You get paid comparably to putting the book out on KDP, but the opportunity to really milk it as some authors do with these cliffhanger paragraphs they call novellas is an opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of. I hate cliffhangers as a reader so I try to steer clear of them as an author unless it's necessary.

AUTHOR CUSTOMER SERVICE IS HORRIBLE in my experience.

Prior to publishing an episode or chapter, the Vella techs behind the screen give it a read and determine if there's any plagiarism or other infractions on their publishing policy. I edited one episode but forgot that I included pieces of it in the next one and it got flagged as duplicate content because it was already published in a different episode.

No problem.

I changed the content so that all of it was original and while it took them hours to flag it, it took nearly 3 weeks for them to correct the alert. Even after all of my episodes were given the green light, I couldn't edit the original flagged episode even though it was given the all-clear.

Overall, it's nothing crazy difficult. The dashboard is convenient and it's easy to publish and throw a serial piece up on the site. I might give it a try again with a story I don't truly care about, but what's up there now will be pulled within the next few weeks. I would pull it down now but customer service said it takes 60 days to pull the story down in case readers want to come back to it.

They want to enhance the Kindle Vella experience for readers but they're doing a disservice to both authors and their audience alike by not streamlining the Kindle experience. Don't even get me started on why I can't download the Kindle app onto my Firestick.

Anywho, I'm taking my talents to my website and other platforms. Take a look at my Instagram for some writing tips, short stories, and all-around Tee shenanigans as I take this journey to become a world-renowned writer in the best shape of her life. (Not the best shape but I'm trying to get there)

Writing Tip #2