Kindle Vella Changes and other Implosions...

Or why I decided to stop writing serials for a while

Hey there, so I’m wandering onto Substack finally, and probably transferring my blog over here in the long run as I slowly get used to how things work on here.

As it happens, this is something I wanted to share anyway, and a somewhat revised version of an announcement I made on my other blog thingy (on my website), combined with something I shared on Patreon.

To start off, I’ll just say that some changes on Kindle Vella happened, which was Amazon’s “new”(ish) serial platform, which never fully got off the ground in a lot of ways. This is their attempt to make it closer to other serial platforms, I think, and while that might be good news for a percentage of writers and readers on there, it’s caught a number of us by surprise and caused us to reevaluate what we were doing on there and whether it made sense to continue. It took me a few days of reading and thinking about the changes before I decided how to react to it, and what I wanted to do with the serials in general.

The short version on the Kindle Vella changes is pretty straightforward: they completely changed their pay structure. Without going too much into details, the previous payment system had been based on the word count per episode, and now it's going to be a flat fee for all episodes, regardless of length.

Like I said, this will work great for some authors, most likely. They can write super short episodes and it will work well with how they write, and the kinds of stories they write, and the pace in which they want those stories to unfold. I'm thinking a percentage of contemporary romance writers will probably love this new format... for a bunch of reasons… and so will some paranormal romance writers, etc.

For me, however, given what and how I write (lots of world building and character development not to mention heavy plot and intrigue), I'm thinking it won't work so well.

My episodes tend to run long. My serials are closer to drawn-out, epic novels in some respects… only with more cliffhangers and more points of view and more of an open-ended “end” point to the longer arc… and I'd always planned on releasing them as novels in the end.

In fact, the plan was to start that this year, with the first book being my next project after this latest Quentin Black Mystery novel I'm currently writing. I figured out that with the serials I've written already, I've probably got like eight novels' worth of writing in rough format, if not more.

I'll need to restructure them pretty significantly of course, as they were all written as original serials and don't really break off or conclude the way most novels would. Also, because they were written "rough" (meaning, I didn't have it all written out when I posted, but wrote as I went), elements of the characters / story / overall arc have changed over time which will necessitate other types of changes.

All that said, they're probably 60-70% there already, if not more... so that's a lot of work that's already been completed.

This is a pretty roundabout way of saying that I've decided to stop publishing my serials on Kindle Vella, and just write them as novels.

I'm still working with my readers on Patreon to figure out exactly what that looks like for them, as I’d been using that as a serial platform before. Most likely, my Patreon folks will soon be getting much larger / longer chunks of novels in progress rather than serial episodes, and more on my day to day writing life. They’ll probably get those excerpts slightly less frequently than the 2x a week (shorter) serial episodes they've been getting up until now, but they seem happy with that so far.

They'll also likely get more blog posts from me, like I said, and more audio and originals and so on... but we're still working all of that out.

This video is my rambly, disjointed attempt to talk through some of that. It’s my Patreon introduction video at the moment, so pardon the call to action at the end…

I did make the decision to take my serials off Kindle Vella, however.

Frankly, it's just too big of a hit, in terms of the financials, and it makes the project a lot less worthwhile in terms of my time. I'd already been considering stopping anyway for those reasons, and moving those projects directly into my novel writing schedule. Right now, it's kind of a distraction to be working on a novel and need to take time off to work on a different project to produce serial episodes.

Again, this might work great for some authors. I have a few friends who prefer to constantly be juggling more than one writing project at a time. It keeps them from getting bored and they like the variety.

But I'm not really a "multiple project" kind of writer.

I tend to get pretty mono-focused and (extremely? unhealthily?) obsessive when I write. I lose myself in characters and worlds, and I would internally (and sometimes externally) grumble whenever I really got into the serial and had to switch back to my primary work in progress (WIP), and vice-versa, when I was really into the novel and had to take time off and reorient myself around a whole different world / set of characters. Just in practical terms, it’s really time-consuming for me to have to stop and start and re-immerse myself. It slows down both projects when I have to take the time every few days to remember where I was in terms of story, character evolution, etc., and to have to do it on command to hit my due dates.

So yeah, like I said, I think this might just be about me and how I write.

This serial thing was always an experiment, and I don't regret it at all since I wrote a bunch of stuff I may not have gotten to otherwise (or not for a much longer time), and I think some pretty cool novels will come of it. As novels, I also think ALL of my readers will like them... since so many of my readers have been very vocal about not being serial readers.

Because of everything stated above, overall, I'm feeling very good about this change. Kindle Vella's changes might have been the push / catalyst to do this, but it's something I've been mulling over for a while.

There are a number of good news things coming of this for the serial readers, too - they will get their whole stories faster as I will write them more like I write novels in general so they won't have to wait for weekly installments.

AND they will get a full story / ending for DEMON THIEF too, which is an enemies-to-lovers romantasy that I had to drop due to time / inability to sustain more than one serial. I had a number of people howl that I stopped after like 50 episodes, so I'm glad I'll be able to bump up finishing that as a full-length novel, as well.

So... yes... I can very honestly say I think this is all GOOD news for people who like my work, and good news for me personally, too. It will definitely suit my more obsessive writing style better, which generally means I write more and faster.

And thus ends my very first (real) substack post ~ I hope you enjoyed it!