As it promised final month, Amazon has launched its serialized fiction Kindle Vella retailer that allows you to unlock episodic, self-published tales by way of in-app purchases. The new platform is a approach for readers to find new fiction and a brand new approach for authors to generate income from the Kindle Direct Publishing service. 

While the title may counsel in any other case, Kindle Vella is not out there on Amazon’s Kindle e-readers. Rather, you may solely discover it on Amazon.com or the Kindle iOS app (no Android for now). To begin with, the service will likely be restricted to US-based authors who publish tales in English. 

The serialized tales will run from 600 to five,000 phrases per episode, with the primary three supplied free of charge. To see subsequent episodes, you may have to pay for “tokens,” with costs starting from $2 for 200 tokens as much as $15 for 1,700 tokens. The latter provides you with about 34 episodes, although costs per episode rely on the phrase rely — the extra phrases, the extra you may must spend. 

Authors, in the meantime, will obtain 50 % of the income together with bonuses based mostly on engagement with the app’s social media-style options. To that finish, readers can comply with tales to be notified of latest episodes, depart a thumbs up for episodes they like, apply a “Fave” for his or her favourite story of the week (supplied they buy tokens), and share on Twitter, Facebook and different social media. To enhance engagement, authors can converse on to readers on the finish of episodes to “share story insights and behind-the-scenes content,” Amazon wrote. 

Since Amazon opened Vella to authors three months in the past, “thousands of authors” have revealed “tens of thousands of Kindle Vella episodes across dozens of genres and microgenre,” Amazon stated. Authors look like as nicely. “I’ve revealed near 30 novels, and I’m having fun with the journey of writing The Marriage Auction on this new format,” stated bestselling creator Audrey Carlan in an announcement. Whether or not the format takes off now will depend on readers — to attempt it out, you’ll be able to entry Vella here.