Cover It - Some Basics for Cover Design

Kindle Vella

Amazon has launched a new platform through Kindle called Vella. 

Vella is a way for authors to share serialized stories an episode at a time. Episodes can be from 500 - 5000 words. Readers must purchase tokens to unlock episodes. Tokens seem pretty reasonably priced. $1.99 gets you 140 token and the first few episodes of every story are free so readers can find stories they love without spending any tokens. You need one token to unlock 100 words, so the higher the word count for a chapter the more tokens you'll need. For the moment, it is only be available to authors in the U.S. publishing in English. Stories will only be available through the ios app or on Amazon.com. All of us android users get left out once again, which is a disappointment. 

This seems like a good opportunity for authors. You keep 50% of the profits. Since Amazon is reputable company it's a much better guarantee that you'll actually see that money as opposed to the horror stories I've heard about places like Webnovel. 

Covers for the Vella stories are simple 'icons' that are 1600X1600 and display as a circle image. A lot of graphic designers have begun offering premade Vella covers for around $50. It's worth checking out for those who are looking to show off their work to wider audience and maybe make a few bucks while doing it. Since it is Amazon, you're stories must be original works and as far as I know they don't accept fanfictions. 

I do know that at the moment, Vella is a bit wonky. Navigation to find Vella stories is iffy. They have a lot to work out before it becomes a viable platform.

Here's a link to Amazon's little page on Vella, it doesn't give a lot of info, I assume they're still working some of the details out. There's a little more if you have a KDP account on the author side of things >

Here are a couple of examples of Vella covers (these are a couple of the premades available on my website)