Vella and Kindle and 'zon, oh my!
the only constant in the publishing industry these days is change
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Vella is dead, long live Vella!
Well, actually, no: it’s really very much dead.
If you don’t know what Kindle Vella is (was), it was a subscription platform for serialized stories. It was Amazon’s take on Wattpad and Radish, an attempt at a cash grab from a growing population of readers and writers which launched in 2018, just in time to catch a huge wave of readership during the COVID lockdowns in 2020.
Mind you, it wasn’t a very well thought-out cash grab. They threw the idea at the wall to see if it would stick, but never gave it the resources to thrive. For one thing, it was never available outside of the U.S., when the international market for serialized stories is actually much stronger than the American one. For the other, it used an arcane system of buying tokens to read installments of stories, which most readers were unfamiliar with—it was lifted from online manga platforms, but was unfamiliar to the rank and file of readers, most of whom were coming from Kindle Unlimited.
And, of course, Amazon was very insistent on taking the largest cut of the proceeds for much the same reason they screw over Kindle Unlimited authors, which mostly boils down to “because we can.”
My bias, let me show you it.
Some are saying this is a sign that subscription platforms are not sustainable, but there are plenty of subscription platforms that continue to thrive, including sites like Patreon and Substack. So what’s going on?
Earlier this year I wrote a post related to this very situation: Books, Merch, and Audio oh my: Is the self-publishing industry growing or shrinking? (hence the callback in the title of this post!)
As people wonder if the closing of Vella “proves” that serialized fiction is a lost cause, I draw your attention to my basic premise in that post:
Are we all doomed??!?!?
Before we panic, it might be worthwhile to look past the hype and actually figure out whether the self-publishing industry is growing or shrinking. At least, that was my plan. As I considered how we might be able to determine which is the case, though, I realized that it is the wrong question…or, at least, that version of the question is immaterial.
The question "is the self-publishing industry growing or shrinking?" is less important than HOW it is CHANGING.
That has never been more true than it is now.
Vella represents a transitional stage of subscription platforms, represented by the fracturing of subscription models.
Sites like Patreon, Substack, and Ream make it easy for you to support a writer individually by subscribing to their work. Platforms like Kindle Unlimited and KoboPlus let you subscribe to the platform itself so you can binge on whatever you like (a.k.a. the Netflix model). Your subscription dollars can be spread across all of those platforms, allowing you, the reader, to engage on your own terms.
Which is something I keep preaching about: technology has reached the stage where readers and writers can make those decisions. We are not stuck in the cable television era of 1992, where there were 57 channels and nothing on…and no options. You either had cable, which gave you access to 57 channels, or you didn’t. There was no in between and very few choices, outside of paying an upgrade to also get HBO.
The self-publishing industry has been in a similar stage for a while. When Amazon Kindle launched in 2007, it was the only game in town for digital “ebooks” and one of the few options for self-publishing, outside of vanity presses. Barnes & Noble scrambled and nearly self-destructed in its efforts to play catch up. The Apple self-publishing quagmire is still a mess. For nearly a decade, self-publishing was done by ‘zon’s rules, take ‘em or leave ‘em.
But that era is long past.
Authors can have some books exclusively on Kindle Unlimited, publish other books wide (including on KoboPlus), and serialize stories on free platforms (Wattpad, RoyalRoad, etc.) to serve as funnels to their own subscription accounts or platforms. This shift is also starting to happen with audio books, as well.
I think Vella was always doomed, unfortunately for the authors who were making a living there (and quite a few were!). But the flip side is that now authors don’t have to tie themselves to exclusive, predatory contracts for their writing just to make a dime.
Cable television could not keep up with the internet, and neither could Vella.
Many years ago I said that at some point, authors would have their own subscription platforms where readers could subscribe to a book, or a series, or the author in general, or just give micro-payments for individual chapters. That is already possible, technologically speaking, and will become easier and easier as technology advances.
(Allow me to once again flog my project scope for my dream author platform, should anyone want to build it.)
It is hard to take a high-level survey of the landscape when it is still changing so much (witness A.I.). Sites like Vella shutting down represent change, sometimes painful change for many authors, but are not necessarily negative for the publishing/writing industry as a whole.
I sympathize with those getting hard hit by this, but I want to help you all take a step back and look at the long view: the more we control our own publishing, distribution, and earnings, the better.
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