Amazon’s serialized story service dubbed Kindle Vella is almost here, as the company has announced that it’s launching in mid to late July.
The announcement was made in a post on the Kindle Direct Publishing site, where the company also reiterated some details about the service. Basically, authors will be able to publish serialized stories on a weekly basis on a new Kindle Vella store, where readers can access the first few episodes of a story for free, then buy credits to read the rest.
Credits start at $1.99 (around £1.40 / AU$2.60) for 200 tokens and run to $14.99 (roughly £10 / AU$20) for 1700 tokens, with each token being worth 100 words of content. So how many tokens you’ll need to buy an episode will depend on its length, which can range from 600-5,000 words.
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Authors receive 50% of what readers spend to access their stories, and readers can give a thumbs up to stories that they like, and a ‘Fave’ to their weekly favorite. Amazon will then highlight the stories that receive the most Faves, so that they get more exposure.
iOS and US only
It sounds like an interesting new way to experience written content then, but Kindle Vella isn’t actually going to be available on Amazon’s Kindle ereaders at launch, which seems like a bit of an own goal. Rather, you’ll have to access it either on the Amazon website, or on the Kindle iOS app – with the Android app also being left out.
Additionally, Kindle Vella will initially only be available in the US. But we’d expect it will roll out to more regions over time, and we certainly hope it will come to the Android app and Kindle ereaders before long too.
Via Goodereader
