Have you heard of Kindle Vella? It’s a new program on Amazon where authors post serialized stories and readers can follow them to read each episode as they come out, like a weekly TV series. You can read stories on the Amazon website, in the Android and iTunes Kindle apps, and on Kindle Fire. (Other Kindle readers aren’t supported yet, but the program is still being developed.) You can find more information about Kindle Vella here.
Serialized stories are actually older than television. Many authors have published episodic stories in newspapers, including Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens. Now there are apps to deliver stories digitally, and they’ve gotten really popular, especially in Asian countries. Kindle Vella is a new service to try out serials that’s based in the US.
My first Kindle Vella story is YA paranormal thriller, my first time publishing in this genre. I was inspired by the show Yellowjackets to make a playlist of songs that I thought should have been included on the soundtrack, and then that playlist turned into a story. It’s written in the style of my old web journals where we used to write down things like our mood and a song title with every post.
I hope you’ll check it out! The first three episodes of every Vella story are available for free.
Katie and her friends started playing with witchcraft as a game. But they discovered dark magic lurking in the woods. As teen girls, they feel like everyone else makes their lives miserable, from controlling parents and teachers to mean girls and boys. Time to take the power and get revenge. Set in the late 90s, this occult thriller follows a group of teen girls in the Santa Cruz mountains. Inspired by real events. All names and some identifying details have been changed.
Currently, Kindle Vella is only available in the US. In order to share the story with readers in other countries, I’m also posting the episodes on my Patreon.