Kindle Vella Ending, Where Do Authors Go? | Self-Publishing News (Nov. 4, 2024)

[@nategillick]

Thanks for the shoutout Dale! We're quite happy with the number of new user signups at Laterpress since the Kindle Vella shutdown notice. I hope everyone publishing there finds a new home!

[@selfpubwithdale]

Fantastic! And, thanks for putting together that detailed piece. It helps a LOT!

[@richarddelconnor]

I tried publishing a couple of books at Kindle Villa, but didn’t find an audience. It was a good motivator in 2023 to create an autobiographical book about my making a movie that year.

[@selfpubwithdale]

Yeah, I gave it a stab too. Unfortunately, it seemed like a platform that heavily skewed towards romance and erotica. Anything else was getting scraps.

[@TaniasWritingRealm]

Would love to see a more detailed video on the kindle vella alternate

[@selfpubwithdale]

haha Sounds like I need to do a whole separate video for it. You're the second request.

[@coffee_cookies_books]

I've considering a serial book platform so I'll definitely have a look at the article about Laterpress

[@selfpubwithdale]

Sounds great. I'm going to see if I can reach out to some experts about viable alternatives. Stay tuned!

[@coffee_cookies_books]

@@selfpubwithdale That would be great! :) I know there is one more that one of the authors I follow uses, but for the life of me I can't recall the name. I'll see if I can figure that out.

[@DaleLRoberts]

@@coffee_cookies_books I'm just going to toss a few names at you, but this is by no means my endorsement: Dreame, Royal Road, and Wattpad. I've even heard of some authors using Substack for their serialized content.

[@TimeslipNovel]

So I signed up for Laterpress. But there are no options for African countries in the Stripe payment setup so I am AGAIN excluded from another platform just because I live in South Africa. Seriously??? Sorry I'm ranting here, but the Laterpress channel has turned off its comments. 😢

[@selfpubwithdale]

Well that sucks. Sorry to hear that.

[@TimeslipNovel]

@selfpubwithdale just following up. Laterpress were very helpful on X. Apparently not much they can do about the issue at this point, but they responded super fast.

[@Shoptalk4307]

Kindle Vella was destined to fail. I never messed with it.

[@selfpubwithdale]

No argument here.

[@ariesmarsexpress]

I am very much pro AI, but I do think they should pay for the works like any human would if they were reading it. What I don't think is that this will be a big windfall for the artists affected. For each major different AI model, they only need to buy your book once, let the AI read it, and based on my very intimate knowledge of how AI trains, they are not going to need to buy that same book again for that model. In an ideal world, they choose the books carefully for those AIs to learn from. i.e. the best examples of that genre and style of writing. But, even in an imperfect world where they just scan every book in existence (horrible idea), the best the artists could hope for is one book sale for each book in the backlog per major AI lineage. There are at most 5 distinct major AI lineages. That would equate to five book sales per author per book in their backlog. You are not getting regular or high income from this. Furthermore, your style of writing is not copyright-able, so even if it really likes that style and suddenly has every person on the planet writing just like you or me (god I hope not), then you are not getting compensated for it. A fundamental misunderstanding about AI that I have come across, being both a writer and an AI developer, is the notion that when an AI reads your book for training, it is copying that work. The reality is that AI learning is not radically different from how a human learns. There is not a copy of your book being held in its memory as it runs on someone's browser somewhere in the world. If they did have that, AI would be a nonviable product because no one could afford to run it. Also, that wouldn't be intelligence of any kind. The other thing to think about is let's say they first train the initial model on the English language followed by the complete works of Stephen King, and it is later fine-tuned on my horror novel, it's not likely to add anything to its model from it unless someone tells it, "Can you write me a **horrible** horror flick in the style of Aries Mars Express?" I write sci-fi or fantasy GL Romances.

[@selfpubwithdale]

Well stated.

[@JamesSedgwick-jp6hh]

Laterpress sounds promising. Kindle Vella was offering the first ten episodes for free. That's ripping off the writers. Say for example if each episode was around 5,000 words a piece. That's 50,000 words for free. The length of a smaller novel. That's insane Dude! Goodbye to Kindle Vella! LOL

[@selfpubwithdale]

Agreed! That was a stupid pivot and one I called as a desperation play. I was right. That was their last ditch effort. I truly wish it worked out and feel bad for the authors that are left searching for alternatives.