Serial Writing, 2023

Radish, Vella & WattPad

I've been holding off writing this article on serial writing, comparing Radish, Vella, and Wattpad until I experienced Amazon's Vella.

Let’s define serial writing.

Serial writing is a book put into shorter stories or “episodes” that are fast-paced, released over a few weeks or months. Think of your book if put into a television show format.

• Most episodes are between 600-2000 words. Although I’ve seen episodes shorter and longer.

• Each episode needs to have some kind of open loop. An open loop is a hook of some sort; an unanswered question or cliffhanger. The idea is to keep your reader coming back in the same way you do at the end of a scene or chapter when writing your book. You don’t want them closing it and going to bed; you want to keep them up all night reading. With serial writing you want them to come back and pay for another episode

Why might serial writing be good for you?

• If you do this in real time you’ll learn to write faster. Having to write an episode every week, definitely puts you in the hot seat. If you plan to use something you already have, keep in mind you’ll need to edit it in some way to make it work as a serial read. You may need to break your chapters down into smaller nuggets or change the end of the scenes to have better open loops.

• You get to test out ideas for novels with an audience without spending years of time and money.

• You’ll get immediate feedback from readers.

• Editing costs are more economical because these are shorter stories; although there are many stories where it is clear the authors have not hired editors.

• It’s s a good way to break into publishing. You can build up a following and try out a book you’ve writing or have written with an audience.

• If you already write novels, you can test new ones out. You can divide your chapters into episodes and find out where the dead parts are and change them. If you suddenly stop getting people to show up to read episode 15, you’ll know episode fourteen doesn’t have a strong enough open loop or something else is lacking.

• You will learn how to make a compelling story, with strong characters where every scene has something happening and your reader won’t close the book on you.

Here are the major serial fiction platforms available and my personal opinions of each one. If you have other opinions, please share them under comments.

Radish

This South Korean company has been prominent in serial reading forever, especially romance. Once you've applied and been accepted, you choose from different release and pricing models. Readers can read the first three episodes for free and unlock additional ones by waiting a certain amount of time or paying coins. You get paid a few cents for each episode read. It adds up because, on this platform, you can get thousands of readers quickly, especially if you have more than one story.

Pros:

• Radish is one of the most popular serial platforms around and established.

• They offer different monthly promotion programs every month and you can apply for them if your book is applicable

• They try to promote new writers on their homepage

• There’s a comments function so you can connect with your readers directly

• The app is easy to read on and you can download it from apple.

• There’s a live time area where readers can connect with their favorite authors every day if they wish. If you are the social type you can build a following this way. Amazon is finally testing this in beta.

• You can make money. I’m proof of that. I made money. $118.00 on my first paycheck with one story and little experience as an author. Imagine if you had several stories or a considerable backlist and kept work there for a year or more.

• 40K readers read my book in three months. My goal was to test my manuscript—gain beta readers on a grand scale. I learned about pacing my story and where the drop-off points in the narrative were, so I could edit before shopping for a publisher.

Cons:

• You have to apply and wait for acceptance. It might take a month or more to hear back.

• You have to give them ninety days notification period that you are removing your story and then leave it there for stragglers (for those that may still need to read it, although it will not be available for new readers.)

• During times when there were no promotions, I had way less reads.

• It takes customer service awhile to get back to you if you have a question. Sometime a week, although truthfully they were always helpful.

• Competition is stiff. Pages and pages of books for readers to look at keeps the main pages confusing and difficult for readers to find you and two years later, I’m imagining its worse.

• After a certain amount of days you can no longer edit your episodes and must have Radish unlock the episode to edit.

Vella

After trying Radish two years ago, I was eager to try Amazon’s Vella. After getting onto the app it’s pretty clear they’ve copied the Radish platform, but they missed the boat. It’s but a cardboard cut-out and lacking in the excitement and the readership Radish provides. It gives a similar experience for the reader, but even there it is missing the casino feel. Yes, it has the coins but no open reading times—the locking and unlocking of episodes which is what get’s reader’s excited. On Radish, there’s a small window of times where readers can read episodes for free and then the episodes lock and they can can only unlock the episodes with coins. The only way to unlock episodes on Vella is by paying coins.

Pros:

• Vella is tied to your Kindle dashboard, so you can watch all the money roll in on the Vella dashboard. That's a joke, folks. No money has rolled in other than a Vella bonus—Amazon’s version of Author’s Assistance. In the early days I read one article in Medium from one author who wrote of making $400.00 monthly from the Author’s Assistance bonus money.

• You are allowed to edit your story anytime you need to.

• The platform is backed by Amazon (one would think this is a good thing, if only…)

• Vella Bonus. You receive a bonus each month based on customer activity such as redemption of free and paid Tokens, Faves, and Follows, and the total number of Kindle Vella stories that qualified to receive a bonus that month. For example, even though I only had nineteen readers the first month, who had read my free content only and did not pay to unlock anything, I still received a $5.00 bonus from Amazon. That was very nice of them.

• Kindle Vella will remove your content 60 days after receiving your request.

Cons:

• After your complete editing an episode they aren’t live. They have to be reviewed by Amazon and this can take up to twenty-four hours.

• There is a lack of promotion of the Vella platform. You hardly know if it even exists, unless you know it exists. It’s in tiny print at the bottom of the Amazon page, unless you sign up for it.

• No new author promotions, unless readers have given you a thumbs up on your episodes or crowns. How do new authors on the platform do this if they are new authors? How can you be a new author and get 123 thumbs up?

  On Radish they feature new authors on the home page a couple times to get readers for them. In my first month I had 4000 readers. The only reason this happened is because Radish helped readers discover me. Many of those readers stuck with me throughout the entire story.

  I've had seventeen readers in six weeks on Vella, and that's with me doing a promotion on Bookfunnel with other Vella writers and paying for a promo on the Fussy Librarian. That's how I got the seventeen followers I do have. However, things aren’t that much better for authors that have been there since 2021. Some of them have had 297 readers. Dismal.

• No monthly promotions you can apply for, like what you find at Radish. Radish would run promotions every single month that writers could apply for. If you were selected you were featured. Examples: Good girls and Bad boys. May is for mother’s Day, etc. I did apply for several and got selected for one.

• There are too many authors on the platform and not enough readers. If you got on Vella early and have many stories and built a following it’s possible you’ve gotten somewhere with Vella. Hanging around a Facebook user’s group for Vella, I got a sense everyone is searching for readers and believing someday things are going to get better. Could be, but I might not live that long.

If you have time to promote your Vella book and don't have other books, you might be able to make Vella work by advertising on social media. However, if you are an author with other books to promote, you might find it challenging to include your Vella book, too. Many book readers don't know about Vella. Also, the costs of doing any kind of paid promotions do not make financial sense when measured against the potential gain.

I haven't given up on Amazon yet. It has only been about six weeks, but it's apparent no readers will show up to read without some promotional effort, and Bookfunnel is not the answer. If any of this changes, I will update the contents of this newsletter.

Wattpad

Pros:

• The site has over 90 million users.

• Your work is in front of potential readers and you receive feedback.

• Wattpad Books and Wattpad Studio both offer support for writers in much the way an agent would with publishers and production companies so that is another plus.

• If you want to dip your toe into writing and desire a strong community of other writers and readers, this might be the place for you.

• An easy and fun app to write on.

Cons:

• You can't make any money from Wattpad unless you get chosen for their special program; you can't apply. Probably a great program, but if I wanted to wait to be selected, I'd start querying agents. Maybe you'll feel different.

There are other serial apps that make all kinds of promises of bonus money. I've been messaged by people on IG, but be careful. Some have unfriendly terms for authors, so read the fine print carefully. They want you to write 3000 words a day, want to hold the rights to your books for seven years, and other kinds of silliness.

There are also a few other apps for writing, but more appropriate to non-fiction, so I did not discuss them here.

My final analysis:

I still love serial writing, but if you want to earn from serial fiction, I strongly recommend Radish. If money is not your motivation, Wattpad offers a rich experience, providing a community of other writers.

Have a great week!