Amazon Starts New Royalty-Driven Story Platform

Amazon has announced a new platform called Kindle Vella in which authors can earn royalties per chapter.

A new way to earn royalties.

To access episodes, readers will purchase Tokens and use them to unlock episodes. Authors will earn 50% of the money readers spend on the Tokens used to unlock their story episode.

To make it easy for readers to find stories they love, the first few episodes of every story are always free!

As authors have often revealed short teaser books in a series in order to grab readers, this may be an alternative to that model. In the past, authors might make the first book in a series permafree and then publish a series of short novellas for $.99 each. Readers had a tendency to complain when they weren’t purchasing a complete novel, but this has been an effective strategy – especially for fantasy and romance.

Here, however, readers are charged on a chapter by chapter basis, so at $.99 a chapter – roughly the cost of two “episodes” – so authors have the potential to make much more than charging $.99 for an entire book. A comment on YouTube breaks it down like this:

We think authors will be paid $0.07 per 100 words:

1 token = access to 100 words of content

Token pricing:

$1.99/140 tokens ($0.000142/word)
$4.99/368 tokens ($0.000136/word)
$9.99/770 tokens ($0.00013/word)

Authors/Publishers get paid 50% of the token price, or roughly $0.000065-$0.000071 per word.

To break it down into novel lengths:

10k words = $0.70
25k words = $1.75
50k words = $3.50

This amounts to better royalties than many authors currently make with full-length books – but of course, this depends on the level of engagement, and if the huge reader base from Wattpad and similar sites will start using the Vella store, which is something of a tall order, given most stories on Wattpad are free, except in Wattpad Premium.

Readers can also “Fave” stories they like the most, which can get those stories listed on the front page, likely resulting in a new rallying cry from authors: “Please Fave my episode!” One wonders if this could be exploited by shoddy services offering to fave books in bulk, like Twitter or Facebook likes. It’s currently the only ratings system, as there are no reviews on these titles, so book discovery is fairly different than the Kindle store. Faving chapter 4 of a novel is slightly awkward, but this could change how authors write their books, ending each chapter with a major cliffhanger, rather than each installment of a series.

Right now, readers can read a fair portion of a Kindle book for free and then often pay less for an entire book, so while this does seem like a good deal for authors in terms of royalties, the reader base will really determine if the new platform takes off.