OK, this is interesting. I received an email from Amazon KDP (the email’s legit) telling me that I earned a bonus in August for the Kindle Vella story I mentioned in Oh, my I gone and done it. It’s only USD$2.78, but:
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I never finished it.
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It had only 3 followers.
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It didn’t get any ‘thumbs up.’ Nor any comments. Zero engagement.
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Since I didn’t bother finishing it, I unpublished it. Normally, this takes weeks/months, I learned. This story took only a few hours.
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If I recall correctly, before I unpublished it, the 1st episode had 7 reads, the 2nd, only 3, and the 3rd, 1. Episodes 4 & 5 didn’t get any reads. Not even my wife read them.
Jeepers, I wonder what the bonus would have been had I finished the thing?
I may have to revisit Kindle Vella…
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I tried Kindle Vella as well as KDP Publishing for Amazon and I am putting out a large warning because you really won’t make enough income as it I overly saturated. You’d have to have a lot of money to market the book properly and by then what you paid to market it outranks what you made. Unless you have a LARGE email list or following, don’t do it!
Your time is worth more than that. Turn it into an audiocast series instead and push it out on podcast apps. That is more worth your time because you can get paid by sponsors and then you can maybe try and pitch it to a publishing company once it’s done as an exclusive hardcover book. Or just traditionally publish and cut the bs out.
Cal customer support and you have so little following that they might take it down, so you can publish with a company. That’s what I did and it worked out.
I inquired about the bonus elsewhere, it seems as if there’s no rhyme or reason as to the bonus amounts and the metrics of the story. People got the same bonus AND they finished theirs and had followers, thumbs up and so on. So, on that account, there’s little reason.
I already had them take the story down. It will remain dormant in its current form in Scrivener. I may not ever bother with it.
I prefer self-publishing for a host of reasons I won’t get into here.
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