Has anyone tried Kindle Vella?

[Christine Wheelwright]

What was your experience? Asking from a writers point of view, but also interested in reader's comments.

 

[Laura R Hepworth]

I've not used it myself (either as an author or as a reader), but I've heard a fair bit about it from other authors. It does fairly decently for romance authors (especially erotica), but not as well for other genres. Right now, Kindle Vella is still basically in beta and only available in the U.S. and Amazon has done very little to actually make readers aware of it. They're starting to, but not like they should. They also have authors annoyed because if readers use free coins to unlock paid chapters the author gets paid nothing for them. So, looks like there are still issues to be worked out if they really want the platform to do well.

 

[Valtharius]

I tried it for a few months last year so perhaps I can offer some insight.
1. I was able to make money in the 40-50 USD range/month with barely any readers because of the bonuses they give out, but there were also long periods with literally 0 readers and no revenue generated. If memory serve I made about a hundred dollars in total and got ~20 people to read at least one chapter/episode.
2. Getting noticed is essentially pretty random/impossible unless you have a bunch of pre-existing fans you can bring with you
3. Even if you do have a pre-existing fanbase, executing this can still be hard because Vella is still disorganized/in beta/inconvenient to use
4. Updating regularly helps. That's one of the few things we know for certain about the algorithm.
5. I didn't do #4 consistently and my experiment was largely a failure but even most people who do update consistently, still aren't getting noticed based on my research.