Amazon Admits Defeat And Shuts Down Kindle Vella Fiction Subscription Program
Amazon tried to get authors onto Kindle Vella, but it didn't spark a wave of subscriptions like the book distributor hoped.
In 2021, Amazon saw massive competition forming from Tapas and Substack, creating serialized fiction behind a subscription paywall which posed a threat to their monopoly on published fiction. In response, the company created Kindle Vella. Now, after three years, they are admitting defeat and shutting down the program.
Amazon is notorious for jumping on bandwagons and trying to create new forms of content for readers to consume and to keep authors and customers on the platform through monopolistic practices. The company loves to create subscription models, funneling books into Kindle Unlimited or Audible, where readers spend monthly credits on audiobooks exclusive to the platform.
On the author end, Amazon has made it difficult to do anything but remain exclusive to the platform, as authors lose out on royalty percentages and marketing incentives if they don’t sign up for the programs.
Kindle Vella was another attempt to corral authors into their system from the budding serialized subscription market. Most notably, Tapas and Substack have created ways for authors to post their fiction and receive monthly contributions.
In 2021, Amazon started the Kindle Vella program to capture this market, but the program didn’t catch fire. In a new statement to the Amazon KDP website, they wrote:
We've made the difficult decision to gradually wind down Kindle Vella in February 2025 as the program hasn’t caught on as we’d hoped. We are grateful for the authors who have participated and for the stories you have shared with readers. We remain committed to experimenting and testing new ideas to deliver unique and delightful experiences for both readers and authors.
As we bring the program to a close, we want to give both authors and readers the opportunity to finish stories they have started. Between now and December 4th, authors will be able to continue to add new episodes to their existing stories, however, we will no longer accept new stories or story comments. Starting December 4th, authors will no longer be able to add new episodes to stories, and readers will no longer be able to buy new tokens. Readers will be able to continue to use remaining tokens to read published stories and episodes until the program closes in February 2025. In November, we will announce our last bonus for reading that took place in October, and as always, authors will continue to earn 50% of what readers spend on tokens used to unlock their episodes until we wind down the program in February 2025.
We recommend that you keep your stories live so that readers can complete the stories they’ve started. We also encourage you to publish your Kindle Vella stories as eBooks on KDP, and we have updated our content guidelines so that you may republish immediately as an eBook. On November 4th, we will make it possible for you to download stories directly from your Kindle Vella Library, so they are easier to republish as eBooks.
When Kindle Vella closes in February 2025, we will remove all remaining stories. After this, readers will be able to access any of their unlocked episodes from the free Kindle apps on iOS and Android. You do not need to take any action to remove your stories in the meantime. If you would like to unpublish earlier, we will provide a self-service unpublishing option on December 4th, 2024 so that you’ll be able to unpublish your Kindle Vella content without Customer Service support.
We will continue to post updates to the KDP Community to remind you of these dates and inform you when the download and unpublish features become available.
This is the second failed initiative in recent years as they shut down their Kindle Worlds program in 2018, a program where licensed properties could be farmed out to any author who decided to write. Very few major brands participated in the scheme, leaving the program dead. It seems Amazon cannot become a brand for everything in fiction, despite trying their hardest to squeeze out competition.
What do you think of Amazon shutting down Kindle Vella? Leave a comment and let us know.
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