Kindle Vella: One Year Later
What I’ve learned, what’s improved, what still needs work
Amazon’s serial writing platform, Kindle Vella, officially launched in July 2021. As a self-published author on Amazon, they invited me to try this new platform last year. After one month, I wrote a piece on the pros and cons, and how I envisioned myself using Kindle Vella in the future.
I am writing this follow-up review to discuss where the platform is now, what has been fixed, what hasn’t, and whether this platform is worth trying.
What has gotten worse
While Amazon continues to tweak and update the Kindle Vella home page, it’s arguably worse than it was. There is no rhyme or reason to how they select featured stories, although we now suspect those are merely Amazon staff picks. Beyond the featured stories category, they’ve added top faved, stories you may like, trending, completed stories, popular tags, recently added stories, and recently updated stories.
While it is a good thing to have these new ways to discover stories on the home page, they don’t update them with any regularity. Despite many stories being updated regularly, the same list of books remains week after week. This is a source of frustration for many writers, who struggle to have their stories discovered on this platform.
Another big issue that has cropped up over the past several months are episodes getting endlessly stuck in the review process and not getting published. Several writers have now quit the platform because they weren’t finding any resolution and therefore losing readers and revenue. It’s happening randomly and has been a known issue since at least February of this year, with no timeframe for it being resolved.
