Over at my Substack newsletter, I’ve posted a broad summary of what we know about Amazon’s newest publishing platform, Kindle Vella. A quick summary:

Kindle Vella is a new pay-as-you-go platform for serialized fiction. …

Vella is structured for publishing stories one “episode” at a time. Amazon doesn’t use the word “chapter”—I’ll discuss this below—but, for now, that’s a handy way to think of Vella’s episodes.

Each episode is 600 to 5,000 words. (Amazon’s numbers are so specific, I assume this range is enforced by their software.) Readers can read the first three episodes of a story for free.

If they want to continue reading, readers purchase Vella tokens to unlock additional episodes.

Will I be writing for Kindle Vella? I’m not certain yet. Serialized fiction is more than releasing a new chapter every week. Writers like Dickens and Armistead Maupin succeeded with serializations because they understood how to feed readers details a drop or two at a time, and keep them wanting for more. It’s an art that seemed lost until recently, when episodic fiction began to make a comeback online.

I’ve written before that I see self-publishing as an experiment, and so this is one more experiment I’m considering. We’ll see.

Read more about what Kindle Vella is and is not over at Always Be Publishing.