Bidding Goodbye to Kindle Vella

Will the wormhole story Anomaly hyper-jump from Kindle Vella to Substack?

Having been rather annoyingly abandoned by Kindle Vella two seasons into my serial trilogy, Anomaly, which I’ve published there for nearly two years, I’m now shopping for a new venue to continue the saga.

On the one hand, I like the advantages of reaching out to a specific community of folks who enjoy looking for serialized fiction in places like Kindle Vella, Wattpad, and Royal Road. On the other hand, those communities are very small and seem to require folks to be members in order to read their content. I’ve read Substack posts for years without needing to join anything. I like the possibility of folks wandering into Anomaly on Substack directly off the web or being funneled to it from my ad links without any additional login steps.

Since Kindle Vella started in June of 2021, Amazon has treated it like a red-headed stepchild, and Kindle Vella authors grew weary of that from the beginning. So, I am eager to ditch the annoying limitations of Kindle Vella that severely limited the growth of Anomaly, such as its restriction to U.S. markets only and my inability to advertise it as a product on Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing with my other books. It’s been ironic and very frustrating how Amazon ads can link to both Amazon and non-Amazon products but not to Amazon’s own Kindle Vella.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I am Bill Housley. I’ve been a published author for almost two decades and have several books and anthology contributions in print. I started the serial He Who Stands Still Dies for a newsletter at my workplace many years ago. However, that newsletter later died, and the story sat undeveloped on my hard disk as I wrote and promoted my novel, Into the Dark: Escape of the Nomad, raised my children to adulthood, and struggled through a number of life-changing personal challenges.

Later, I dug up the story, and as I looked around for a suitable way to publish it, I discovered Kindle Vella…a platform designed specifically for serialized fiction. So, for almost two years, I’ve been expanding the story and publishing it, roughly one episode a week, on Kindle Vella. The original first scene of He Who Stands Still Dies doesn’t even occur until partway into the first season as Episode 13: Castaways.

All 52 episodes of Anomaly and the first 40 episodes of Anomaly: Tug of War can currently be found and read on Kindle Vella. However, they have announced that they will stop allowing the release of new episodes on December 4th, a full month before I had planned to publish the final episode of Anomaly: Tug of War. Then, they will completely demolish Kindle Vella in February 2025! Anomaly and Anomaly: Tug of War have thousands of readers, some of whom are still binge-reading through it all.

So, I’ll publish this post and then use it to play with Substack's monetization and see if it suits Anomaly. If I like it, I’ll republish Anomaly and Anomaly: Tug of War here as weekly reruns as I write and publish Season 3 starting sometime in early 2025.

We’ll see what happens.