I blogged about Kindle Vella when I first joined the platform back in 2021, and have mentioned it a few times since. Sadly, it was just announced on October 28, 2024, that Kindle Vella will officially shut down in February 2025. The only reason given was that the platform hadn’t “caught on as they’d hoped.”

The platform had a lot of promise and I really enjoyed posting my stories there before repackaging them as novels. The audience unfortunately remained small, despite my best efforts to gain a following. I wasn’t the only author that struggled, with only a handful having any real success. So, what went wrong?

Lack of Marketing/Advertising Support

One of the main reasons I believe Kindle Vella failed was the fact that Amazon did very little marketing of the platform, and when they finally started marketing it well over a year into its existence, it was minimal at best. In fact, most marketing I saw for Kindle Vella was on social media, not on the Amazon website. I remember even after 2-3 years of Vella existing, how many people didn’t know about it. I would post about Kindle Vella on social media and have so many people ask me what it was, and then shrug it off because it wasn’t something that appeared Amazon was actively supporting.

In addition to this, Amazon also wouldn’t allow Kindle Vella authors to run paid advertisements through their internal advertising platform. I run ads for my novels through that platform, but none of my Kindle Vellas were allowed in my campaigns. For a platform that primarily replied on the writers to promote the platform, along with their own stories, this always seemed like a poor decision.

Honestly, I always had the feeling that Kindle Vella was competing with Kindle Direct Publishing. Almost like they were rivals within the Amazon ecosystem, and KDP had the upper-hand and didn’t want competition from Kindle Vella on Amazon. This may explain why Kindle Vella was relegated to doing most of their marketing off the Amazon website.

Insufficient Device Support

Considering Kindle was in the product’s name, you would expect Kindle Vella to be available on your Kindle device. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. It was only supported on the Kindle Fire, and through the free Kindle app for iOS, Android, and Windows. It could also be accessed via a browser, which is how I mostly used it.

The data isn’t readily available, but I’ve heard speculation that Amazon prices their Kindles competitively in order to sell more books on their platform. This leads me to think that a fairly significant chunk of ebook readers on Amazon read from a dedicated Kindle device, compared to the free app on the phone, computer, or browser. If true, then not supporting Kindle Vella across all Kindle devices certainly hurt Kindle Vella in the long run.

Even if the percentage of readers using Kindles vs the Kindle app is less than half (or even less than a quarter) of all Amazon ebook readers, it still didn’t help Kindle Vella gain traction by not supporting it across those devices.

Geographic Restriction

The final nail in the coffin was the fact that Kindle Vella was restricted to only the United States, both for authors to post stories to the platform, and for readers accessing the platform. This frustrated many of my international readers and I had to start posting my Kindle Vella stories on another platform so they could access and read. I had as many, if not more, international readers on the other platform I posted on. Readers that would have easily doubled my readership on Amazon if they had opened it up for international readers (at the very least).

Since its launch in July 2021, there were many eager authors clamoring to post on the platform worldwide. All they were ever told was to watch for an announcement, which ultimately never came.

Plans for the Future

Since 2021, I had used Kindle Vella to publish my stories, giving my readers early access to my stories before I published them as books. Now that this platform is going away, I am rethinking this option. I could continue to use the second platform I was posting stories on, but in truth it’s not designed for serialized fiction and I don’t feel like putting in the effort of moving those to another serialized platform.

For the time being, I’m going to go back to writing my novels the way I did before I started using Kindle Vella. If an alternative to Kindle Vella presents itself that I find intriguing (currently none of the existing options have really drawn my attention), I may try it out.

Unfortunately, between the ending of Kindle Vella, my chronic health issues, and the current political climate, I’m not able to put as much effort into my writing as I would like. I really wanted to get The Medellan Conspiracy published in 2024, but that is looking unlikely at this point (my apologies). I’m still working with my beta readers to polish it up for publishing. It’s a complete story, but I want it to be as close to perfect as possible before I ask anyone to shell out money for it.

While I am currently waiting on some additional feedback from my beta readers, I’m converting my last Kindle Vella story into a novella. That may be published before the end of the year. It’s called “Alpha Discipline,” and is a kinky omegaverse erotica. If you’re into that sort of thing, keep your eyes open for it. I’ll add it to my Books page and post an announcement here and across all the social media platforms I’m active in (primarily Facebook and Threads).