Kindle Vella

I publish through two main distributers, Amazon and Ingramspark. Ingramspark handles the hardcover book and distributes to major book stores around the world (their online book stores).

Amazon handles the paperback and epub through Kindle Unlimited. Initially I had a choice, publish completely independent and on my own or enroll the epub through Kindle Direct Publishing and get a free ISBN through Amazon. I sorta did the best of both worlds and purchased the ISBN through the United States government (Bowker). It wasn’t cheap, but it was a good investment.

Owning our own ISBN allows you to do whatever you want with your book. I have complete control, I can even update the manuscript if and when I find errors. It’s a really good feature to have through Amazon. However, the most important thing and this is the one that matters the most, Amazon is not my publisher and I do not self publish through Amazon.

Instead, Keitheburns.com is my publisher (yes that’s me). All my novels will have keitheburns.com listed as the publisher for my content (Unless a big name publisher wants to buy me out, hint hint). Essentially, I created my own publishing company. Cool right?

Now, Kindle Vella is coming out. You might be asking what is Kindle Vella. I did when I first saw it. It’s a Kindle App or Kindle Reader driven platform that allows authors to release short stories or full length novels as episodes; think of it as releasing a chapter at a time like a comic book series would.

The light bulbs starting going off in my head. What if I release episodes of content between novels? What if I use different perspectives instead of telling the story through Marathon? I had to consult a good friend, Jared Morgenstern, to see if there was something worthwhile with this idea.

When I pitched him the concept, he like it a lot and suggested some additional things that could be done with this format. So, I started writing. With Abandoned now in editing phase, I am able to write short narratives as episodes leading up to the release.

As you can see the short stories are in beta, meaning that they are not released to the public. I have four episodes completed with more on the way. Each episode gives a bit of narrative that bridges the gap between books.

With Kindle Vella, the first three episodes are free. The next episodes have tokens to unlock. My assumption is that the tokens go by the length of the short, longer the episode the more tokens. I am going to try and keep the shorts to be 800-1000 words. Something to read quickly, but drive a narrative forward.

Each episode will progress a narrative and the combined episodes will have its own little arc. Below you will find a sneak peak at the titles of each episode, when they go live, please check them out.