In March 2024, Amazon Kindle Vella’s episodic publishing program underwent a series of changes. This section here is about just one aspect of those changes. It involves how much a reader ‘pays’ to read one episode of a longer story.
When Kindle Vella first launched in early 2021, a reader would pay an amount, in ‘tokens’, for an episode based on how long that episode was.
Amazon, like many other systems, used ‘tokens’ to try to make the buying process less painful for readers. When a reader has a collection of ‘tokens’ somehow it seems less ‘real’ to buy content. The reader spends tokens more freely than they spend cash. A token was worth around a penny, depending on how many a reader bought at one time.
If an episode was 600 words, the reader would pay 6 tokens. If an episode was 1,500 words, the reader would pay 15 tokens.
You might think this process was fair, since a reader would pay more if they were reading more content.
However, in practice, this got REALLY confusing for readers.
Let’s say a reader was contemplating reading a 30-episode story. That is roughly equivalent to a 30-chapter book, which is fairly typical. However, the reader would have no idea up front how much this ‘book’ was going to cost them!
What if all the episodes ended up being 600 words each? That would be one price. But what if the episodes actually were all 1,500 words each? That could be over double the price!
In our world, we expect to know BEFORE we start consuming something how much it’s going to cost. We don’t go to a restaurant, get handed a menu with no prices, and then only get told at the end of the meal how much we have to pay.
So I think this change is quite fair. A reader should know right at the start how much this reading project is going to cost them. The reader should be able to judge, from their own budget, if they can afford the process.
The issue here arises because the Kindle Vella system was begun in 2021. There are many authors who have put books into Vella with a certain plan in mind. I personally always recommend short chapters, to keep a reader ‘moving forward’. It gives the reader a sense of accomplishment. So if I write episodes which are about 600 words each, I used to get 6 tokens per episode. I’ll now get 10 tokens per episode. I’ve gained a small amount of extra money.
But for authors who decided to create super-massive episodes, at 2,000 words or more, those authors will now only get 10 tokens for each of those episodes. I can see why they might feel a bit discouraged by this change. Sure, the author can take down the existing book and put up the book fresh with better balanced episodes. But that process would mean the new book had a fresh blank slate with zero starting reviews / zero starting thumbs up.
So for the authors with long chapters, I commiserate with your frustration. Change is always rough for some people. It’s the throw of the dice.
For the rest of us, I think this token-equalizing change is really useful and important for readers.
Going forward, authors should optimize their chapters to work with this 10-tokens-an-episode system. Readers should hopefully read more works, now that the readers have a clear idea of how much it will cost them.
Ask with any questions!
Below is my essay about one of the other changes Kindle Vella made in March 2024 – involving how many episodes a reader can read for free in a given story.