kindle vella – Moe Lane

Sic transit gloria Kindle Vella.

I… am not surprised. “We’ve made the difficult decision to gradually wind down Kindle Vella in February 2025. We are grateful for all of the author participation.” Kindle Vella never really took off, so I guess the questions I was asking here have been answered, yes?

To Vella or Not To Vella: that is the question.

This is related to the problem that I have been contemplating all this week: to wit, that there are no markets for novellas, novelettes, or even longer short stories anymore. The cupboard is not just bare: people have gone in and removed the shelves and back wallpaper. We’re lucky they didn’t take the actual doors, too, but I guess the idea was to keep up appearances.

:pause:

That turned out to be a surprisingly apt metaphor.

Kindle Vella is free from now until October 11th (read my stuff)!

Kindle Vella is doing a promotional offer: get up to 100 episodes a day free to unlock stories, from now until the 11th. Feel free to use them to read my stories THE STARS ARE WRONG and SHE IS A DUCAL MODEL IN A ZOMBIE-LURKING GOTHICK WORLD. Again, for free. I’m not sure how this puts money in my pocket, but honestly: if you’ve gotten this far, I don’t mind you reading the stories even if I don’t get paid. If nothing else, it’d be a long-term investment on my part.

#commissionearned

New Kindle Vella: SHE IS A DUCAL MODEL IN A ZOMBIE-LURKING GOTHICK WORLD.

My wife gave me the idea for that title. Moe, she says, Moe. If you must do this, go with Gilbert and Sullivan*. In fairness, I told her I was looking for a bad pun.

Anyway, the first three (and free!) episodes of SHE IS A DUCAL MODEL IN A ZOMBIE-LURKING GOTHICK WORLD** is now live, after many an annoying adventure along the way yesterday night. The rest will hopefully load today.

And check out that cover! Made using only the finest paint.net pixels. Artisanal, those are.

*I am paraphrasing. Perhaps unfairly.

**Formerly THE DEFENSE OF CASTLE WINDERMERE, which would have been a fine title except that a) the party was only briefly at Castle Windermere and b) was never actually shown defending it.

#commissionearned

More on that Kindle Vella story thing.

Public Service Announcement: save all episodes as drafts first. That way, should you miscount and not put the episodes in order, it’s relatively easy to fix that. By replacing the text in a rippling cascade down the episodes; because once an episode is submitted, there is exactly NO way to unsubmit it before it can be reviewed. Which can take up to 72 hours.

This PSA has been brought to you by the barely-concealed urge to… wow. My YT music mix just put Drowning Pool’s Bodies on. That’s it. That’s been precisely my mood for the last two hours.

Moe Lane

PS: The income you can pull from Kindle Vella for the next two months is absolutely worth it, actually.

Getting a new Kindle Vella ready.

I just need a better title than THE DEFENSE OF CASTLE WINDERMERE. It doesn’t really fit, anymore,. Something with a bad joke involving zombies and cooking would work.

There’s money in Kindle Vella, folks.

At least for the next few months, if I’m reading the FAQ correctly. For right now creators are being compensated for people using their free tokens to read Kindle Vella stories (like, say, THE STARS ARE WRONG); and the payout is… rather higher than I was expecting. Enough that I’m going through my Patreon short stories to find ones that I haven’t otherwise made available for free, or put in a chapbook.

If you’re an author and have any kind of audience, I suggest you consider doing the same. At least until July 2022.

Reintroducing my Kindle Vella story: THE STARS ARE WRONG.

I don’t want to just abandon THE STARS ARE WRONG: it’s a fun Cthulhu Mythos story where I was trying to switch things up a little. I don’t think it deserves to just end up as an academic footnote somewhere. So I’m putting up the link again, in the hopes it’ll get more play this time. Or, you know, any play at all.

Trying the Kindle Vella ‘thing:’ THE STARS ARE WRONG.

I dunno if this is going to work, but it’s worth an experiment, at least. THE STARS ARE WRONG is a novella (also, last month’s Patreon short story*) in a Cthulhu Mythos style… with a twist! And also provided in serial form. It’s functionally equivalent to the aforementioned Patreon offering, so if you’re a Patron there’s no need to check it out. Mostly I just want to see what happens.

Moe Lane

*Interestingly, Kindle Vella does not care about reprints. More or less: you can’t put up anything that you don’t have the rights to, or anything that’s available for free. But apparently being behind a paywall is fine.

So I’m looking again at Kindle Vella.

I didn’t at first, because I didn’t have anything really new to use as serial fodder. I don’t want to use the current one on my Patreon, because I’m trying tom make that an inducement. But as I got my eight hours of sleep last night, something must have jogged loose in my head; because I woke up thinking, So. Should I have Lucas show back up before the next Tom Vargas novel? And I realized that I had a story to tell, there.

So. Maybe I can use Kindle Vella for that. As an experiment, belike. I dunno. It’s all about the liquidity, folks.

Moe Lane

#commissionearned