When I first heard about Amazon’s new serial fiction platform, Vella, it inspired me to try my hand at serial fiction. LitRPG and GameLit have roots in web fiction on sites such as Royal Road – Vella was my chance to get into the medium (and hopefully earn some money along the way). But the platform ended up being exactly what I didn’t need.

Liked

That’s not to say I had an entirely bad experience. Permadeath was my first foray into serial fiction, and I prepared by studying existing serial fiction and television writing. I had a blast writing Permadeath and am ecstatic with the result as an artistic creation. However, as a product, certain conditions on the Vella platform left me wanting.

Loathed

US Only

Right now, Vella is in a US-only Beta release. I may be an American author, but much of my network of readers, author connections, and even editors are international. I knew the platform would start as US-only but figured Vella would give me tools and visibility toward building a new audience on their new platform. Well…

Bring Your Own Audience Mentality

Vella, at this stage, does not offer authors many tools for promoting their work and growing their audience in-platform. They seem to expect authors to drive traffic to their new platform themselves – fair enough for authors with massive catalogs, mailing lists, and advertising budgets. For someone like me, with a small and mostly international audience, asking me to onboard them to a US-only platform could never work.

Monetization Model

On Vella, readers pay per chapter. Wherever I promoted Permadeath, my audience pushed back against this monetization model – with good reason. Web fiction readers are used to free content on sites like Royal Road. Amazon customers will likely have libraries of free content through Kindle Unlimited.

And I suffered with them! Every chapter of every story on Vella asks: do you want to quit now? Personally, I avoid microtransactions where possible – I’ve played various Gacha games for years without spending any IRL cash (Fire Emblem Heroes and Genshin Impact for the curious). How could a dedicated free-to-player like me enjoy paying every fifteen minutes?

Action Points

No retrospective is complete without deciding on action points to remedy the issues that have been identified. Naturally, I want to move away from Vella. But where will Permadeath Reincarnation live?

At novella-length, Permadeath is currently quite a bit shorter than LitRPG readers prefer. The length also makes it a poor audiobook candidate, as Audible’s monthly credits system mean long titles cost the same as short. I could publish it on Royal Road, but I fear the lack of regular updates will doom it to obscurity. (I plan to release Permadeath episodes in 8-episode “Volumes” – think new seasons being added to Netflix.)

But a novella is perfect for a reader magnet. For those unfamiliar, reader magnets are incentives for joining an author’s mailing list. They should provide a taste of the author’s style and content – if a reader likes the reader magnet, they should also like the author’s paid catalog. And Permadeath fits this bill perfectly. Permadeath has a lot in common with my main series, Nullifier: fantasy action, badass girls, and insecure protagonists who end up acting heroic anyway.

Permadeath Reincarnation is now a free download for anyone who subscribes to my mailing list. It’s a good launching point into the J.R. Ford catalog. If you don’t like it, unsubscribe without qualm – you likely wouldn’t like my other works. But if you do, there is plenty more J.R. Ford content available now and releasing in the future.