I already knew Kindle Vella sucked and didn’t get enough readership, but I didn’t know it was this bad.
Bold theory: A lot of those Google- and Amazon projects fail because users kind of expect them to disappear rather sooner than later. So why bother to begin with?
Maybe throwing random half-baked ideas at the wall in hopes that something instantly sticks isn’t the most efficient way of innovating. The first wheel wasn’t perfectly round, either.
An expectation that both companies have spent years encouraging!
And the more investment the project requires from the user, the more wary they are going to be.
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Honestly, yeah. I knew it was bad from the start. It was trying too hard to be a replacement for WebToons, but I believe Tapas has web novels as well, so they didn’t have much going for them. They were at a deficit instead. Not only that but getting to the site was not easy! I would be misdirected to the main Amazon page or the regular Kindle page. Vella was not visible on Kindle devices either and it was overall, very inconvenient. To be honest, it should have been its app if it was going to stand a chance, but instead, they lumped it in with the rest of Amazon. No marketing was done. No one knew about it. When I would tell the family about it, they’d go"Kindle what now?"
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Well it didn’t require any money investment, but they made it seem like they would handle the marketing, but no one knew about Kindle Vella besides writers. That in itself is a huge issue. Readership, even for the most read stories, was shockingly low. It needed expanding. It was not capable of audio. It did not allow for the author to create banners and sample chapters strictly for advertising as WebToons does. It was lackluster and I found the offerings boring. Why? Because chapter by chapter does not work unless the whole thing has already been finished. You can’t write a chapter of an unplanned and unwritten book and release it, then just decide to fix it later. It’s already out. People already read it and now you’re stuck with your mistake. Sure, you can edit it, but what good will that do?
A writer’s time and effort are valuable, too. As are the opportunities that might be missed by not putting the work elsewhere.
Serialization can work, but writing something that’s intended to be serialized is different from writing a book that’s intended to read as a complete thing.
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That’s a clear sign that Amazon was never really committed to it. Certainly if they want to drive traffic somewhere, they know how to do it.
I mean, yeah. You have a point. It does come down to the marketing though. Spiderman, for instance, is serialized. It is very clear that it is. Vella decided to market itself as a way for writers to make money on their book while they finish writing it and then they can publish the whole book via kdp when they are done. Which is not right, because it messes with the editing process. And if you had it done already, then why not just publish it already? It tried to solve a non-issue. Serialized is it’s own thing that started with magazines and radio. It should have been very clear in the marketing, what this was for. It paid depending on how many words you write, which is not how taditional publishing works. It encourages needless scenes, prose, and extra dialogue just to make up money for time spent. The whole thing was an ick.
Great idea, terrible implementation. (No international release, not available on Kindles, weird royalty and the bonususe were… odd.)