Sad news. Amazon just informed me that their experimental Kindle Vellas are being discontinued. Seems no one is buying them.

For those who don’t know, Amazon realized people love to read things on their phones, like Facebook, Quora, blogs, etc. So they came up with Vellas. Short, serialized stories that are easily digested on your phone. Rather than straight purchases, you buy credits and after the first few installments of a series, you use these credits to buy the next episode.

I suspect that it was the credits that were the issue, not the stories themselves. Some writers have tens of thousands of readers. I have 4.

The new year will be Vella-less. Stories will persists in presence for a while and then will be shut down.

That’s a shame, really. I used Vellas as a novel farm, developing the A plot for some future novel where I would add B and C plots, flesh out a few things… but, while I enjoy those stories, I’m not sure I will develop them as novels. Maybe. Eventually.

Story time: My writer’s group used to host Writer’s Cramp, where once a quarter, we’d come together in a beautiful house (thanks, Debi!), enjoy dinner, and then write from 6 to midnight. OK, some of us were getting older, so we didn’t make it to midnight most Cramps. I developed a story that I only wrote at Cramps. It was about 30% done when the Cramps stopped. So, now I have a novel that I do really like, but haven’t written anything more on. Mostly because the crime that motivated everyone’s actions hasn’t coalesced in my head yet. I’ve got four novels on the schedule going forward, and I should probably add that as a fifth. But something else always crops up first.

Our writers group, formerly the Writer’s Block (because most of us lived on the same block), is now the Writer’s Arc (because we’re national now, meeting on Zoom). I can’t help but think Vellas would have been great fodder for the Cramps. Ah, well.

If you’re interested in joining Writer’s Arc (most of us, if not all, are Christians, so beware), let me know.