It’s been nearly a year since I launched my first Kindle Vella story, and I’ve come to a few conclusions. I’ll lay out my thoughts below – first from my perspective as a reader, then as an author. There were a lot of positives and a lot of challenges, and I think, ultimately, you’ll have to draw your own conclusions. The purpose of this review is to share my experience in a way that I hope is helpful.

My Reader Review

What I loved

The Kindle Vella platform gives you the ability to read the first three chapters of a story, and during my exploration, I discovered some really great content. I enjoyed stories like “The Force of Magic” by Hunter Chadwick, “The Superhero Saga” by Julie C. Gilbert, and “His Protector” by Sara Vinduska.

KV also provided a number of free tokens to new readers, which helped me get past my initial hesitation to dive into the platform. When I started, KV gave me 500 tokens, but this number has changed and is subject to change again at any time.

What I hated

Kindle Vella stories can’t be read on my Kindle paperwhite. I had to read all the episodes on my phone or laptop. Which I hate. Which is why I have a Kindle paperwhite. I’m not sure if there’s a fix coming for this any time soon, but I hated being forced to read outside of my preferred method of consumption.

Searching for stories is too cumbersome. Every search option had thousands of listings and no way to filter them further, at least none that I could find. Searching on the website was a nightmare. I’d often get results from the whole of Amazon instead of just the Kindle Vella platform.

App searches were even more difficult. I had two options: click on the pre-listed categories, or enter a search term and hope for the best. Honestly, I don’t know how these stories are arranged, but after scrolling through a few pages, I gave up.

Inconsistent quality in the content. Listen. I know not every story is for me. And I did find some stories that I really enjoyed. But on my way to those good stories, I found a lot of really, really bad ones. And, sure, being able to read the first few episodes helped me filter out the bad and not waste my time and token. But it took so long to find a story I liked. I appreciate the access Kindle Vella gives to authors, but some level of quality control is needed.

Unlocking Every. Single. Episode. While I’m not against the token system itself, unlocking episodes grew tedious pretty fast. I couldn’t buy the episodes in bulk, or even a handful at a time. For stories I wanted to sample, this was fine. But for stories I liked, I found it burdensome. I would have preferred the convenience of unlocking multiple episodes and having them ready at my convenience.

Finally, tokens could only be purchased on the website. It made for a terrible user experience. Running out of tokens forced me to use my phone’s web browser to log in or switch to my laptop. Either way, it interrupted the experience.

What I found confusing

The reward system needed work. Liking episodes and following stories turned out to be pretty straightforward; the crown system? Not so much. The system is designed to give readers an opportunity to spotlight their favorite story of the week. I could only dole out a crown if I’d unlocked episodes that week, and if I forgot to use the crown, it expired. No collecting crowns, no matter how many episodes I unlocked. Seemed arbitrary, but that aside, I never knew if it actually worked.

If I crown a story, I expect the crown to show up somewhere. But mine never did, and there were no records anywhere that I gave out the crown or that the crown even existed on my side. Here’s how things went: The crown icon turned gold when a crown became available, and then went gray after selecting a story. That’s the only indication that something happened. I couldn’t go back and check which story I crowned that week, and none of the stories I crowned ever showed the icon.

Best I can tell, Amazon calculates whoever has the most crowns at the end of the week, awards them with a crown, and puts them in the “Top Faved” Category. Week after week, it looked like the same stories to me, so it felt like a false reward.

Second on my list: episode lengths. Across the platform and between episodes there were too many inconsistencies in episode length. If Vellas are meant to be bite-sized stories, why are some of the episodes so long? I’ll speak more to this in my author review, but every episode is given a limit between 600 and 5000 words. The low end is fine. The high end is way too high, and the gap between them is huge. An episode with 5000 words costs about 50 tokens, and I often ran across stories with three short, free episodes, followed by an exorbitantly large episode. Since authors are paid by word count, it seemed a lot of stories aimed for length instead of consistency and flow.

What I wanted to see

I want to caveat this by saying I am not normally a serial story reader. I’m a newbie to this world, and I don’t think it’s for me. That being said, there were some features I would have liked to see on the platform.

Better search options across devices. I want filtering options for the Kindle app to narrow search results. I’d even settle for preset filters like “recently updated” or the option to narrow the search by tag, author, or words in the synopsis. This feature would have saved me so much trouble.

Making stories available across all Kindle devices would be fantastic.

Summaries of stories in Kindle app search results. If I’m searching for a new story, the author’s name isn’t as important as the story summary. I’d even settle for a tag list. But clicking on stories, then going back to the search results, often ended up with me clicking out of my search, or losing my place in the list, and I just don’t have the patience for it.

Dedicated section for posting schedules. Authors don’t have to use posting schedules, but there’s no way to search for the stories that do, because the search feature is insufficient, and there isn’t a spot for them, anyway. Some authors use the title to post a schedule, like “Title – posts weekly” and others insert their schedule into the summary or tags. For everyone else, you just wait until the author decides to write another episode. It’s not a very reliable system, and it’s a risk I take as a reader. I could be enjoying the story, and one day the story just . . . stops? Once is enough to make me want to throw the whole platform away.

Better sharing options. Sharing stories is difficult. If I’m enjoying a story and want to share it on social media, there isn’t a share button in the app. I have to find the url, copy and paste it, and hope that it doesn’t do something weird when I post it on social platforms. Which it has on several occasions. From the website, it’s a little easier, but that’s my least favorite method for reading.

Review options not limited to the standard Amazon review. You have to be a verified purchaser to review stories, and if you used free tokens to unlock episodes, that doesn’t count. That’s not the main issue, though. The issue is that your review will show up under the story listing, which means spoilers for those who aren’t as far, or a summary that may not be complete, depending on whether the story is finished.

If you’re going to force me to unlock every episode, at least give me the option to review every episode. If I loved an episode, I want to be able to say so. Taking it a step further, I’d love to be able to interact with other readers who have also commented on the episode.

Author notes and poll questions are great, but interacting with each episode would have made the experience special. Other serialized story platforms already do this. I hope as the platform develops, some of these issues will be addressed.

My Author Review

Setup

I found the process of setting up my episodes pretty straightforward. Uploading the episode meant reformatting some of my content, but the previewer helped me work out any visual issues. My biggest challenge came with getting my story image just right. Vella has a recommended file size, but seeing the image at 200 squared pixels on the website is not the same as seeing it as a teeny tiny circle on your phone. I had to make a lot of tweaks to get it to look visually appealing in all sizes.

I also had some difficulty trimming down my synopsis to the 500 character limit. I’m used to word count limits. Character limits are a little tougher. Describe your story, which you may or may not have finished writing yet, in about 100 words, give or take, and that’s what it’s like. I had a few summaries written already, but none quite that small. Have a thesaurus handy.

Platform

I take issue with the platform’s system of merit. It paints all stories alike, and marketing is the only option for differentiation. There’s very little quality control, if any. Other platforms have a dedicated group of authors, or have stricter guidelines for paid authors. Vella is not like other platforms.

Tokens, which determine royalties, are calculated by word counts, which is a terrible system. A well written 700 word story is better than a 2000 word ramble, in my opinion, but there is no way to distinguish yourself. Smaller episodes aren’t even a searchable category.

Readers can like and follow your stories, but there’s no filter for those things, either. Search results are random. They aren’t ordered by alphabet, by likes, or by anything that I can really peg down. The crown system, which gives readers a weekly chance to spotlight your story, is frustrating. Best I can tell, crowns don’t always appear, and only do for a short period of time (some report crowns staying as little as a day, others have had it up to a week).

Readers and authors are currently limited to the US. So for my international friends, there is no Kindle Vella for you at the moment.

Payment

The KV platform pays in two ways: royalties and bonuses. The royalty system is so miniscule that you’d have to have a lot of unlocked episodes to make a little bit of money. Token rates are anywhere between .008 and .009 cents, with a lot of numbers behind them, and KV splits it 50/50.

As the author you have zero control over the payment system, and Amazon can decide to dole out extra tokens to readers as a marketing strategy at any time. In the beginning, KV would pay for these extra tokens, but they’ve done away with that. You aren’t paid anything for the first three episodes.

Bonuses are where you’ll find significant earnings, and Vella distributes those according to its own mysterious algorithms. I received a substantial bonus for my very first story, a very encouraging start. The ones that followed were a bit disappointing. My first month on the platform, I published episodes several times a week and received several likes and follows. For my second story, I posted irregularly and did very little marketing.

The difference in bonuses between the two seemed pretty small. Best guess is that publishing new episodes is more lucrative than obtaining likes and follows, but again, Amazon’s calculations aren’t public knowledge. And even if we crack the code, they can change it.

There’s also been a gradual decline in bonus funds for the platform as a whole. A number is published monthly showing the “Bonus Pot” for the KV platform, and those funds are distributed to authors. Whether the number of authors has grown or the metrics have changed is anyone’s guess.

Marketing

I found it extremely difficult to market for Kindle Vella for two reasons.

First, I have no leverage. Vella likes to give freebies to readers to encourage participation in the overall platform, but I don’t have that option as an author.

Second, it’s hard to find me. The platform doesn’t make it easy for readers to naturally find my stories. The only highlighted stories are in very limited lists, and I didn’t have much luck landing in them. I’m not sure if my story ever ended up in the “Newly Added Story” category, because there are so many new stories being published every week. I did get some visibility in the “Completed Story” category, but it was a short-lived experience.

I can only speak to my own interactions with the platform, but I found navigating KV to be too much work, and as an author I had to work really, really hard to market. There was no unified method I could give that would work across devices. If someone used the Kindle app, I had to give them a specific tag, or they had to type in my author name exactly as written in the search function. And not the general Kindle search. They had to navigate within the Kindle app to the Kindle Vella section, then scroll down to the search box.

If I posted a link, it could only be used on a web browser. If someone clicked on the link from their phone, it would take them to the web browser on their phone (or to their Amazon shopping cart app instead), which meant logging in and going through that annoying (but necessary) 2-step verification process, and by the time that was done, the link often disappeared into the great unknown. Sometimes it landed, but I found more failure than success.

Though the platform is relatively new, it’s been around long enough for the initial excitement to wear off. There’s no sense of urgency to drive readers, except what you create. So if you’ve got fantastic marketing skills, or a significant following already, you may find much more success than I did. But it’s a hard sell.

Support

There is no support from the Kindle Vella platform. You’re left to figure out a lot of this stuff on your own. I did find support from fellow KV authors. Many of their shared experiences helped me make adjustments and try things, and there are a lot of groups that actively support one another on social media. I found many of these groups helpful. They’re also great for finding new stories and sharing your own. Just be wary of any practices that violate KV’s Terms Of Service.

My Kindle Vella Conclusion

I don’t regret trying out the Kindle Vella platform. In the end I decided it wasn’t for me. It took up too much time with too little to show for it, and I’ve got other projects I need to focus on (Check out Works by P. J. Leigh, if you’re curious).

I do recommend giving it a try to see if it works for you. You may find success where I didn’t, and the platform will likely make improvements over time. It’s a great way to give voice to smaller stories, and I’ve even seen some use it for their poetry. So long as expectations are managed, I think it could be a very rewarding experience for many writers.