So, I’ve decided that I am going to give Amazon Vella a try, and publish “The Fallback Plan” on it. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s an episodic / incremental publishing model run by Amazon where, much like the old radio dramas folks used to listen to, you write a story in episodes and the reader can keep up with them as they go. The episodes can range between 500-6,000 words, and I am going to shoot for around 2,500 words per installment. Vella prices are in ‘tokens’, where each token is 100 words, so it is the same price to the reader whether I post ten 500-word episodes or one 5,000-word episode.
As of this writing, four ‘episodes’ have been published, and three of them are already live. I expect that the fourth will be available by tomorrow, if the previous three are any indication. Depending on how well this works, I may release everything on Vella going forward. It provides two things – for one, readers get more frequent access to what I’m writing. Despite the fact I haven’t published anything new in the last five years, I haven’t been inactive – I’ve simply got a ton of half-written stories which I start back in on, spend a few days re-reading and editing to polish the earlier bits, and then write a few chapters before getting pulled back into a work project for a week or two. So, I’ve got about 255k (yes, a touch over a quarter million) words of stories written across six major projects and a few minor ones, but none finished and published in the last five years.
My hope is that with an active story and live readers, I’ll manage to move forward instead of going back and re-editing every month or so. For Fallback, I have 15 episodes already written and I’m presently planning to publish weekly. With four episodes published, that means I have 11 weeks of content available, which means I only need to write about one new episode every two weeks in order to publish the 30th chapter in 30 weeks.
It’s important to mention, I’m not abandoning the regular e-book market. Even if Vella takes off phenomenally well, at some point the story is finished and it’s ready to put into a complete e-book. At that point, it’ll be made available via all of the usual channels.
Depending on how you folks feel about it, I might start posting Progenitor 4 episodically as well. It’s another work in progress that’s roughly half done at this point, with months’ worth of content already written.
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