This spring, Amazon announced a new serialized story program called Kindle Vella. Authors will post a new serialized story on a regular schedule and readers will purchase tokens. Programs since as Wattpad and Radish have used this approach to serialized fiction for awhile.
Kindle Vella’s genres include science fiction, fantasy, romance, and children’s.
Many years ago, I started writing stories about my Cocker Spaniel, Stormy and I training to become a reading therapy dog team. I had great dreams of me as the author and my cute Cocker Spaniel reading with kids in schools.
It didn’t happen. Stormy didn’t pass the final test. A car door slammed and he stood up and barked. We didn’t pass. Barking was forbidden. I could have retested him in a few years when he matured but it was a lot of work to keep his all his training skills current.
But the training program was not wasted and many of his new skills made him a very wonderful off leash beach dog on the Oregon Coast. Every walk he greets people, never jumps up on anyone, knows how to stand still while children jump around and try to pet him, and stays under voice control as we walk the wide open beaches.
For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what type of book I was writing. It seemed to just be snippets of Stormy’s training and he’s a dog. We all know where pet stories end up–with the dog at that final vet appointment. I really didn’t want to write that type of book.
But I kept working on the stories.
And then this spring I attended an Eastside RWA virtual meeting and an Amazon rep was there talking to us about publishing with Amazon. In the last few minutes suddenly the tone shifted from how to upload your book with KDP to this new program, Kindle Vella.
They were rolling Kindle Vella out for KDP authors to try for a few months–upload a few stories, see the format, the layout and then this summer Amazon would roll out Kindle Vella to readers.
The spark caught. This wasn’t the first time I had been on the cusp of an Amazon rollout with publishing. I heard Jon Fine talk about the KDP program at a conference on Whidby Island as it rolled out. The spark in the virtual room was the same as it was at that conference on Whidbey Island.
Stormy’s story! My heart beat fast. Stormy’s story was episodic. It was a story that could easily be rolled out in short bits of a serialized story. And I had kept adding to those original stories. Not only did I have the stories of him in training but I had years of our beach stories. I had drafted enough content to feed a serialized story for a very long time.
I got off that meeting and set up my Kindle Vella page. I uploaded a picture of Stormy for the cover.

Kindle Vella creates the format to be a small circle which readers will see as the cover. I wrote my blurb.
Stormy. Born for greatness as an agility dog. But greatness slips out of Stormy’s paws when he flunks his first puppy agility test and is reassigned as a pet dog, Now, Stormy must learn the rules of backyard dog barking contests, how to coexist with a pesky cat, and most importantly, how not to steal other dog’s treats in weekly training classes. A humorous and joyful journey told through the eyes of a dog who is trying to teach his Human how to see the world one sniff at a time
And then I stopped. I needed to do some editing of the first stories. I had just finished an editorial map so I had a strong direction of how to revise each story.
But it took me awhile to get back to the revisions.
And then this week, I posted a picture to Stormy’s Twitter feed of him in front of our first sandcastle for Cannon Beach’s Virtual Sandcastle summer festival. (Usually this is a day in June but because of the pandemic it’s been a virtual event the last two years. Sandcastle builders can build at any time and take a picture and enter it in the contest).

Stormy’s sandcastle tweet went viral. Quickly the likes and retweets came in. I knew for the rest of the summer, I will be taking pictures of Stormy with sandcastles and posting them on his Twitter account. But I also knew he was doing a better job on his social media accounts that I have done as an author.
And I got back to revisions on his stories. I spent the week working in the morning before I had to log into my online teaching role–one of the huge perks of my job. I don’t have a commute and often use that time as my writing time.
By the end of the week I had the first five stories uploaded to Kindle Vella. According to Kindle Vella, the first three stories will be free to hook readers into the series and then readers will purchase future stories with tokens.
There is no official launch date yet for Kindle Vella to readers–but the buzz seems to be it will launch before the end of July and in order to go live in that first roll out, authors need to have at least five serialized stories posted.
Kindle Vella recommends authors know the roll-out for their serialized stories. Will it be every day? Every three days? Once a week? And then keep it consistent.
I’m not sure what my roll out will look like. I’ll be curious to see how the first five stories go.
But I know somewhere in those stories will be one or two about sandcastles!