Kindle Vella is Impossibly Expensive

Readers might spend $25+ to finish one story.

When Amazon announced the inception of Kindle Vella back in April, I was so excited — a smorgasbord of new stories to consume just as fast as I could read them! But after the platform debuted in July, a few minutes exploring the offerings revealed that it’s far from the reader’s paradise I’d imagined.

For those who don’t know, Kindle Vella is a new storytelling option by Amazon in which authors publish stories one short episode at a time. It hearkens back to the days of Victorian serials when everyone from Dickens to Thackeray and Trollope published novels in magazines in monthly installments. David Copperfield was published in this way.

Amazon’s reasoning is that 21st-century attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, with people used to consuming media in small bites rather than in long paperback or Kindle novels.

Quite a few articles on Medium talk about Kindle Vella from a writer’s perspective. For example, in What is Kindle Vella and How Can It Make Me Rich?, Walter Stein urges writers to get involved as soon as possible to take advantage of this new publishing opportunity. Monica Leonelle points out that while Vella has its negative aspects, it might be a valuable platform for authors who can write fast and produce a lot of stories. And Sara Zarr criticizes Amazon for confusing writers with Vella’s chaotic rollout.

But what about the reader’s perspective? As it turns out, it’s not that great.

The problem isn’t a lack of interesting stories. In just a few minutes, I picked out five that I wanted to read:

• The Dream Heist (Christina Farley), a sci-fi thriller in which the heroine enters dementia patients’ dreams.
• War Core (Dean Henegar), a LitRPG adventure about a new champion who must defend the earth.
• The Galaxy’s Huntress (Justin dePaoli), a sci-fi thriller in which the aliens “are nothing like we imagined.”
• 1954 (Pepper Pace), about a young Black actress who takes on a role that completely immerses her in 1954.
• The Marriage Auction (Audrey Carlan), plot self-evident from the title.

I’m sure if I’d spent a bit more time, I’d have been able to pick out dozens more.

But as I investigated the prices, I realized that purchasing my desired stories on Kindle Vella would cost way more than if the same self-published books were published as regular Kindle novels.

Payment on Kindle Vella comes in the form of tokens. You can read the first three episodes of a story for free to see if you like it. Then if you want to continue, you spend a certain number of tokens to unlock further episodes. For $1.99, you can purchase 200 tokens, which buys you four episodes. But given the number of episodes per story, four episodes is nothing.

Let’s take a look at the episode counts for each of those five stories I’d like to read:

• The Dream Heist — 52 episodes
• War Core — 48 episodes
• The Galaxy’s Huntress — 21 episodes
• 1954–16 episodes
• The Marriage Auction — 10 episodes

Say I pick just one of these stories, The Dream Heist, to read. I get the first three episodes for free, but I still have to pay for 49 additional episodes. How many tokens will that cost? The pricing runs as follows:

• 200 tokens — 4 episodes — $1.99
• 525 tokens — 10 episodes — $4.99
• 1100 tokens — 22 episodes — $9.99
• 1700 tokens — 34 episodes — $14.99

The 1700-token and 525-token packages would only buy me 44 episodes — not quite enough to finish The Dream Heist. So I’d have to go with 1700 + 1100 tokens, shelling out $24.98 on this one story.

If I wanted to finish all five stories? I’d have 132 episodes to buy, meaning four packages of 1700 tokens for $59.96. And due to the ongoing nature of serial publication, these stories aren’t necessarily finished. They may have many more episodes coming until their authors are done.

Maybe $60 isn’t a lot for five books from traditional publishers, but unless it’s a book I really want, I don’t tend to spend more than $9.99 for the Kindle format. In the case of self-published books by authors I haven’t tried, I buy a lot of $1.99 and $2.99 Kindle books. My limit is about $4.99 per book, because I buy a lot of them and I have to spread out what I spend on them accordingly.

I’m angry about all this. I’ll probably be able to buy only one book from my Vella wish list, which sucks because having dipped into several stories’ first three free episodes, I’ve gotten just enough of a taste to see that each of them is awesome and fun — especially The Dream Heist. I’d love to savor scrolling through the pages, breathlessly reading episode after episode (the serial format heightens the sense of action and makes every episode feel high-stakes). But $25 for one Kindle book is just too much for me.

In conclusion, Kindle Vella kind of sucks for readers, unless you have unlimited funds. I see most stories being abandoned after a few episodes, even if readers really like them, because people can’t or won’t commit to paying for tons of episodes. Amazon claims that Vella is all about forging connections with readers through Likes, Faves, and the Author’s Note feature at the end of each episode, giving writers space to “share additional thoughts, insights, or let readers know when to expect the next episode.”

But actually, Kindle Vella discourages readers from making connections. Each of us could probably pick out dozens of Vella stories that hook us with their fantastic descriptions, but we’ll never be able to read them because of the expense. And that’s a huge loss for all readers.