The thing about Kindle Vella is that it is a dumpster fire, but not even for the reasons people think! (Realized this post is extremely long and about a topic few people care about so I'm dropping it under a read more now sorry)

There are some weird rumors going around (which is fair imo since the ToS is like notoriously vague & untransparent) but nothing as funny as the truth: it was an absolute fuck-up of a money pit on Amazon's part that totally failed to retain authors even after throwing random quantities of cash at (some of) us, and everyone just took the money and ran.

To clarify a couple of rumors I've seen: no, nobody signed a contract guaranteeing Amazon indefinite weekly updates!!! (Lol.) There are also, like, some pretty arbitrary rules about availability, but nothing close to KU's draconian exclusivity policies; my story was serialized concurrently on multiple platforms & has since been published wide in the same places as usual while still available on Vella.

What happened, I think, is that Amazon began offering these mysteriously generous bonuses* (calculated through some arcane and ever-shifting metric that nobody has ever been able to figure out) to attract authors. The problem is that Vella sucks to use for readers, too. It's in beta with almost no visible improvements in two years; it looks like shit, especially on desktop; there was no quality control for a while, so the charts were dominated by scammers posting AI-translated gibberish; there were all these weird glitches that made entire chapters of different stories randomly swap; it's actually more expensive than indie e-books in most cases, etc.

So there were not enough readers to sustain the bonus pool, which used to increase every month but has stagnated at $1mil for several months. Everyone got pissed about the drastic drop in income (mine dipped almost 50% between months despite performing better by all metrics) and left; now this website, which nobody uses, is a graveyard for unfinished stories. Even if they did promote it for once, so much of the stuff there is abandoned! I truly doubt it is long for this world unless they massively overhaul it, but it's clearly not a priority, so...

Anyway I find all of this very funny & think it's a bummer that people don't know about it & instead believe that a bunch of people voluntarily signed up to be permanent content generators for Amazon. Like, no... they were obviously trying to create a system of financial dependency to coerce authors into sticking around a la KU, but made such a bad website that they couldn't even afford that :)

*For reference, just to show how absurd the bonus system used to be: my first year on Vella, I made $100 in royalties (meaning people spent around $200 to read it in total), which is nothing. Only 150 people ever paid to read my work by reading past the sample chapters; of these, only 35 finished the first story arc. I made $4000 in bonuses that first year and stayed on the bestseller-equivalent list (typically bouncing around the top 50-150) basically the entire time. I still don't understand how or why & it still didn't stop me from jumping ship the moment my bonus decreased, but yeah... I made like $30 for each individual person who paid any amount of money to read my story. Incomprehensible.