Random Ramblings

Bezos is a Butthole

I hate Amazon. Well, that's not exactly right. I wouldn't use the word hate in this scenario...

I despise Amazon.

That said, I have an uneasy partnership with the aforementioned world-eating corporation. Things are quite hard for content creators, forcing authors to compromise their values in exchange for a steady source of revenue. My first foray into the literary world has been fairly quiet but I expected nothing less from a debut novel. (Is it really a novel if it's a collection of stories?)

Library of Nightmares has been a moderate success and received a fair amount of acclaim. With this, I am content.

But one cannot live on scraps alone. My next attempt (The Book of Shadows) was going along quite slowly until I caught wind of a new program launching through Kindle. Naturally, I was interested and wanted to know more.

"Kindle Vella, the new way to read stories.' That remains to be seen, I thought. But I cannot deny it is a bold strategy... Kindle Vella is an episodic format, offering readers three free chapters of a story and changing per episode afterward. Each episode requires tokens to unlock, each amount varies depending on the word count. Authors get a larger cut than they would with a traditional publication but I have my doubts.

Also, wouldn't readers prefer to pay upfront and have an entire story at their fingertips? The execution and reception are crucial to the success of this new format, but I can't deny that I'm a little curious.

I decided to see how it works for myself and uploaded a good amount of The Book of Shadows. If this works, I could schedule chapters to release weekly and finish writing it while earning a few bucks in the meantime. Not a bad plan, eh?

But... I ran into some snags and things quickly grew frustrating as I struggled with the barebones submission tools and argued with the reviewing team. Somehow along the way, they discovered an excerpt of the prologue on some website I frequented years ago. Understandable, I thought. It'll be a quick fix, just gotta log in and remove it.

And yet after I deleted my account and offending text, the results were still popping up in Google.

I surmised this must be the website metadata, an old snapshot that wasn't yet purged from the servers. But this was enough to keep my story pending submission for weeks. Once I finally got that situation cleared, I had to re-upload each chapter and fix all the proofreading errors that I cleaned up previously.

It was a major pain in the tushy.

And now when I finally can breathe, I learn that this isn't even fully launching until next month or possibly later. Kindle Vella is only available on the formal website or on iOS apps. No Kindle support, no Android apps. Not even launching outside the US currently. So all that work for a fraction of the audience?

Time to hit the bottle, folks.