Giving Kindle Vella a Try

 After talking with a friend who is having some well-deserved success on Vella, I’ve decided to give the platform a try.

After all, who doesn’t like success when it comes not only in the form of folks saying they love what you’re doing, but also in the form of checks to the bank account?

What is Kindle Vella?

Vella is a way for writers to share stories with readers — one episode at a time. It’s like TV for fiction.

Or if we go way back, serializing a novel was basically how most long popular fiction was first published up until the 1960s.

Back in the 1800s, newspapers and magazines published poetry, short stories, and novels (in the form of serials, one episode at a time).

During the heyday of the pulp magazines, many magazines serialized novels. Most of which were never published in paperback or hardback.

Vella is today’s recreation of a time-honored method of publishing fiction.

Vella exists as an app for your phone and tablet, and also as a website (which is how I use Vella).

How Does Vella Work?

Vella is a platform for you to read serialized fiction. The first 3 episodes are free to read. 

Think of this as Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. The free episodes help you decide if you like the story enough to spend money reading the rest of it.

If you like what you see, you can unlock the further episodes by buying tokens and then using the required amount of tokens to unlock the additional episodes. 

Episode length determines how many tokens you need to spend to read that portion of the story.

Why Vella?

More and more people are consuming content, both entertainment and informational, on their phones.

Many people find it difficult to engage with and commit to a full-length novel. The size alone of some of these books is daunting.

After all, we’re busy. And when you’re time deprived, looking at a 500 page novel just might be a commitment you don’t want to take on.

I think this is one reason why audiobooks have taken off. One can listen to an audiobook while doing something else.

In fact, my step-daughter has said this very thing: she doesn’t have time to sit down and read a novel. But she loves stories. So instead of reading, she listens to audiobooks while cooking, or driving to work, or riding her bike.

But audiobooks aren’t for everyone. I don’t particularly care for them myself. Often the narrator is not at all good, and that results in a less than optimal experience.

Vella takes a different approach. An old approach and makes it new. 

Vella allows readers to read short bites of text. Instead of staring at the whole pan of lasagna, you are only looking at one short, exciting scene or chapter. One little mouthful.

This makes Vella perfect for reading on coffee break or on the commute, or even when you’re in the bathroom.

Join Me On Vella

I’m giving Vella a try. When I was a working stiff, reading was sometimes a chore. The book never seemed to end.

But with episodes no longer than 5,000 words, it’s easy to get in your reading fix at least once a day. And maybe more.

Tales Macabre and Arabesque is my first foray into the world of Vella.

The first 3 (free) episodes will go up the 28th, 29th, and 30th of October. That’s this weekend. On Monday (Halloween), the first locked episode will be available for you to unlock. And a new episode will appear each Monday thereafter for 13 weeks.

Tales Macabre and Arabesque is a collection of 15 short stories. Some of the stories are bizarre. Some, uncanny. Others, unsettling. A few are weird. And a number qualify as dark humor.

Fifteen tales, divided into 17 episodes, that will take you to worlds you never knew existed and inside the minds of some you perhaps don’t want to see.

Join me. Here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B0BK7N75BJ

See you there!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

CW Hawes is a playwright, award-winning poet, and a fictioneer, with a bestselling novel. He’s also an armchair philosopher, political theorist, social commentator, and traveler. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a cup of tea. Thanks! PayPal.me/CWHawes

The Serial Novel

Last week I mentioned my intention to serialize the working draft of my next Pierce Mostyn novel, The Medusa Ritual, on my website. That plan is still in the works. I’m thinking of 18 weekly installments issued during February, March, April, and May. Then in June I’ll publish the revised novel in ebook form.

Why serialize a novel? Why not? As near as I can tell, the serialized novel has been around since at least the 1700s. It is generally agreed that the overwhelming success of the serialization of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens from March 1836 to October 1837 established the commercial viability of serialization as a publication format.

During the Victorian Era, in general, the highest paid authors were the ones favored for serialization. If your book wasn’t chosen for serialization that usually meant you were considered a mid-lister.

During the pulp era, magazines often serialized novels. In fact, many pulp era novels never saw print in book form and languish in often rare and deteriorating magazines. Today, however, there are publishers seeking to remedy that situation and you can find pulp era serialized novels now coming out as ebooks and print on demand paperbacks.

Recently, I bought an ebook of Robert James Bennet’s lost race novel Bowl of Baal, serialized in All Around Magazine from November 1916 to February 1917. This is the first book publication of the novel.

Rex Stout’s lost race and subterranean world novel, Under the Andes, was originally serialized in All Story Magazine in 1914. It didn’t see book form for over half a century.

In 1932, Weird Tales published the only Jules de Grandin novel Seabury Quinn wrote in 6 installments from February to July. The novel didn’t see book form until many decades later.

However, not just obscure novels were serialized. As mentioned above, Dickens made serialization financially lucrative for publishers and authors. All throughout the Victorian era and well into the 20th century very popular novels first appeared as serials — many which are considered classics today.

In addition to Dickens’s novels, below are a few other classics that were serialized initially:

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

And the list can go on and on.

So if serialization was so popular, what happened? I think a major answer lies in the demise of the print media. First radio, then TV, followed by the internet have damaged interest in print. Magazines and newspapers have suffered the most, and those were the vehicles that serialized novel length fiction all throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th century.

A second reason lies in what serialization tended to do to a novel. Things that were not considered good writing:

• Excessive length
• Too much repetition
• Plot lines that didn’t go anywhere
• Excessive melodrama leading to cliffhangers

One reason the novels were revised for issuance in book form. However, publishers (and even readers) think novels have to be a certain length, and so to achieve that length some of that “bad” stuff was kept to pad out the novel.

So is there a future for the serialized novel? I think there is. Writers seeking ways to drum up interest in their work and to secure for themselves an audience, are exploring whether or not serialization will help to that end.

After all, most TV series are nothing more than serialized “novels”. So if we can watch our “novels” in installments on TV, why can’t we do so again in our reading material? No reason, really.

So I’m going to experiment with the serial novel. And I hope you’ll participate in this adventure by telling me what works for you and what doesn’t. Because, I am after all writing the book for your entertainment. I want you to enjoy it. And you can help me to achieve that end.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!