I understand your logic, but not your anger. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Sandy

Item: A book is not written chapter by chapter. Poor writers do this. Authors do not. Every “author” (really, they’re all wannabe bloggers) I see gushing over this ludicrous delivery method thinks they can grunt out a chapter and toss it up without considering timelines, flow, editing, continuity, or even consistency within the lore of their own universe. Competent professional authors make mistakes with full editing staffs while writing a book as a whole— you want to do it in pieces?!

Item: Serial fiction has been tried before with writers such as Stephen King and Piers Anthony. It failed. If they can’t make it work, you won’t, either. Wattpad and Blogger are full of two chapter long “novels” abandoned by writers with good ideas and no clue how to organize them or even write them coherently.

Item: Readers will stop buying serial fiction the very first time the author of a book they’re reading misses an update. John Scalzi was almost dropped by his publisher for missing five deadlines on the “Interdependency Trilogy” because he couldn’t stay off Twitter. That’s a guy who was under CONTRACT.

Item: We don’t even wait for entire TV show seasons any more, and you ninnies think someone is going to wait a month for the next chapter to your YA dystopian vampire romance story?

Item: Authors make a payout of around $0.000475 per word. You’re not making a car payment with that. It’s not even worth the time to write it.

Write your book. Edit it. Publish it. Stop looking for shortcuts.

If I sound pissy about this it’s because it’s a pathetic Amazon cash grab attempt. Few authors of any quality will write (and if you’re not already published with an established reader base, I’m talking about you— and your blog doesn’t count.) Because of this, the reflected value is low, so readers won’t buy. This makes it a death spiral. Why would I waste my time and money buying one chapter of a book that may never be finished when I could spend about the same amount for a full novel, such as John Conroe’s “Zone War” at $0.99 per book?

You might want to check to see if you can set it up so that people don’t have to wait for the next installment.

Sandy

Deborah, I thought more about your comment later because the piece about manually dripping out content didn’t make sense. It should be automated, right? So I investigated. You can upload an entire book (as long as it hasn’t been published elsewhere), then schedule each episode to go live at specific times — say, one episode a week. So…no worries about your editor twiddling her thumbs.

Sandy

It has potential, Alicia! I agree with you on finding those readers. It’s a challenge no matter what platform you’re using. Good luck!

Sandy

There were no places to publish it way back in the beginning of the century, but I’ve often wanted to go back because of the protagonist.

It MIGHT be suitable for this platform.

The biggest problem is always the same: marketing. Finding the first readers for something new, takes time, effort, and serendipity. But the actual story is in the can. Huh.

Thanks!

Yes, writing the whole story first makes the most sense for you. But it also sounds like the format isn’t a good fit for how you like to work, so trust your gut.

Sandy

Deborah

I wondered about that, too, Amy. I think it’s possible that your content could be rejected because it’s nonfiction, but that’s just a guess based on the information Amazon has posted about the platform. I think the real question is: Should you? Nonfiction readers aren’t going to be searching for content on the Kindle Vella app, so you’d have to work REALLY, REALLY hard to drive your target audience to it. Will the payoff be there? I love a creative take on things, but this might be trying to cram a round peg into a square hole.

Sandy