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In October 2024, Amazon announced that Kindle Vella will be winding down in February 2025.
Kindle Vella Stories are an episodic way for content creators (aka authors) to publish content. Altogether, Kindle Vella Publishing is mostly geared toward fiction content and I share in this article how to participate.
My first fiction Kindle Vella Series
Up to this point my published content on Amazon (and really anywhere) has been non-fiction/business content – like my marketing series books or Christoph’s Content Corner. Now, I’m trying my luck with a fiction Vella story titled: “The life of a content manager. What could go wrong?”
Two episodes (aka chapters) in and the evolving storyline is already crazy in my head. We have corruption, some violence, and who knows what else is going to happen. You’ll have to follow along. Episodes are published one at a time…
Basically, after each episode, the readers can vote for a few weeks of what should happen next (think interactive Netflix rom-com) Consequently, the story will evolve with the majority vote in mind.
(Yes, IT. IS. FICTION. I’m not John!)
For the most part, I’ve found that it’s just as easy to write and edit directly in the Vella platform so that’s what I’ve been doing. The Grammarly Safari extension checks grammar for me.
Publishing your Kindle Vella Story
To start your Vella story start within Kindle Direct Publishing:
Think of this as the introduction to your topic. For my first attempt when Vella first came out in 2021 I did this:
This is actually the overview of what the following episodes will be about. Pick a category. For business writers, it’s pretty limited and you’ll probably just pick non-fiction.
Once that’s setup you click publish and start episode 1 – which is basically your first 600-5,000 word article. Story = Topic. Episode = chapters.
Creating Amazon Vella episodes
To create your first content, keep clicking along and file it here:
There’s very little formatting that you can do and images or other multimedia is not allowed. So it’s truly uninterrupted reading so to speak for your audience.
Submit your content, it goes in review and if approved should publish within 72 hours – basically the standard Kindle Direct Publishing approval window. Usually my books when they got this notice were approved much faster. My fiction content manager story was approved within just a few hours.
How do authors make money on Amazon Kindle Vella?
Meanwhile, the first three episodes are free to the reader. After that, authors need to set the price (in tokens) of how much access costs. That revenue is then split between Amazon and the author.
It’s another avenue to build your brand and especially if you have a fiction story in you, this is a somewhat manageable way to get that done. Instead of writing a whole book at once, you simply write one chapter (600 words or more) at a time.