Hey, so this JUST happened, so it's taken me a little while to decide how to react to it, and what I want to do with the serials in general.
What prompted me taking a second look at the serials / my publishing schedule is that Kindle Vella just completely changed their pay structure. Without going too much into details, the previous payment system had been based on the word count per episode, and now it's going to be a flat fee for all episodes, regardless of length.
This will work great for some authors, I imagine! They can write super short episodes and it will work well with how they write, and the kinds of stories they write, and the pace in which they want those stories to unfold. I'm thinking a lot of contemporary romance writers will probably love this new format... for a bunch of reasons.
For me, however, given what and how I write (lots of world building and character development and lots of plot and intrigue), I'm thinking it won't work so well.
My episodes tend to run long. My serials are closer to drawn-out, epic novels in most respects, and I've always planned on releasing them as such. In fact, the plan was to start that this year, with the first book being my next project after this latest Quentin Black Mystery novel I'm currently writing. I figured out that with the serials I've written already, I've probably got like eight novels' worth of writing in rough format. I'll need to restructure them pretty significantly of course, as they were all written as original serials and don't really break off the way most novels would. Also, because they were written "rough" (meaning, I didn't have it all written out when I posted, but wrote as I went), elements of the characters / story / overall arc have changed over time which will necessitate other types of changes.
All that said, they're probably 60-70% there already, if not more... so that's a lot of work that's already been completed.
This is a pretty roundabout way of saying that I've decided to stop publishing my serials on Kindle Vella, and just write them as novels.
I'm still working with my readers on Patreon to figure out exactly what that looks like for them. Most likely it will be my Patreon folks getting much larger / longer chunks of novels in progress less often, versus the 2x a week (shorter) serial episodes they've been getting up until now.
They'll also likely get more blog posts from me and audio and originals and so on... but we're still working all of that out.
I did make the decision to take my serials off Kindle Vella, however.
Frankly, it's just too big of a hit, in terms of the financials, and it makes the project a lot less worthwhile in terms of my time. I'd already been considering stopping anyway, to be perfectly honest, and moving these stories/projects directly into my novel writing schedule. Right now, it's kind of a distraction to be mid-novel and need to take time off to work on a different project to produce serial episodes. Again, this might work great for some authors. I have a few friends who prefer to constantly be juggling more than one writing project at a time. It keeps them from getting bored and they like the variety.
But I'm not really a "multiple project" kind of writer. I tend to get pretty mono-focused and (extremely?) obsessive when I'm writing, and I would internally (and sometimes externally) grumble whenever I really got into the serial and had to switch back to my supposed "primary" WIP, and vice-versa, when I was really into the novel and had to take time off and reorient myself around a whole other world / set of characters, remember where I was in that, and write a bunch of episodes to hit my due dates.
So yeah, like I said, I think this might just be about me and how I write.
This serial thing was always an experiment, and I don't regret it at all since I wrote a bunch of stuff I may not have gotten to otherwise (or not for a very long time), and I think some pretty cool novels will come of it, things that ALL of my readers will like... many of whom have been very vocal about not being serial readers.
So overall, I'm feeling good about this change. Kindle Vella's changes might be the push / catalyst to do this, but it's something I've been mulling over for a while.
There are a number of good news things coming of this for the serial readers, too - they will get their whole stories faster as I will write them more like I write novels in general so they won't have to wait for weekly installments. And they will get a full story / ending for DEMON THIEF too, which is an enemies-to-lovers romantasy that I had to drop due to time / inability to sustain more than one serial. I had a number of people howl that I stopped after like 50 episodes, so I'm glad I'll be able to bump up finishing that as a full-length novel, as well.
So... yes... I will very honestly say I think this is all GOOD news for people who like my work, and good news for me personally, too. It will definitely suit my more obsessive / immersive writing style better, which generally means I write more and faster. :)
That said - if you have any feedback or issues or concerns around this, please let me know, either via the comments or the contact form! I'm in the process of changing the website and all book back-matter to reflect these changes. It'll likely take me at least a few days to get it all done so I apologize in advance for any confusion.
Best wishes, and happy reading to all ~
