Vella experiment successful

So, thanks everyone – I’ve learned some things about Kindle Vella, and I’m going to share them now.

First off, Amazon talks about how their bonus algorithm rewards different things. This is said in order to be mysterious, but apparently it is not that mysterious. It’s pretty simple that if your story made no money, it does not get a bonus. Amazon has made some noises about rewarding consistency and interaction and things, which honestly I’m handling better in my other stories than in Fallback sometimes. They might make these dependent variables on things, but it certainly doesn’t award you bonus money on stories which don’t generate some kind of payout.

Anyway – royalties on Vella have a relatively low royalty payout, but then you also earn a bonus on top of that which makes the royalty payout look like nothing.

In the month of Feb, I was entitled to a whole whopping $2.45 in royalties for the month, based upon 95 episodes read in The Fallback Plan. During that time, I also had a few reads on Winning the Genetic Lottery 2 and Progenitor 4, but at the time they just had free episodes, so they didn’t collect any official royalties.

Of those 95 episodes read, 54 of them were “locked” episodes – meaning that someone paid to read them via Vella tokens.

The bonuses were awarded today, and none of my other stories which haven’t earned royalties, got a bonus. The Fallback Plan, on the other hand, earned $236.26 in bonus on $2.45 in royalties. That’s nearly 100x.

There are folks doing much better than me on Vella, but I’m happy with what I have. I earned more royalties for Feb from this one story, than I earned in the entirety of 2022 put together, across all my platforms. That having been said, for some reason 2022 was just an amazing pit of a year as far as public interest.

On a side note, if anyone here is missing the discussions I used to have about how much it pays to write erotica… lately, I’ve been chit-chatting about that over on Reddit. I put together a post over there recently, summarizing what my numbers have looked like over the last 11 years. This is a hotlink to my post over there; it will render better if you click on it and view it.

On a side note, if any of my old writer friends are reading this, and are thinking about getting back into it – do it! Why not? Throw some stuff onto Vella that you’ve been “meaning to finish” for a while, and use its release schedule to force yourself to actually move forward. To quote Conan, there’s time enough for sleep in the grave.


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