Kindle Vella has a top five. From what I can tell, the goal is to get into the top five for more visibility. In the top five right now, there is a wide variety of stories.
Number One is a mystery called Beach Blanket Murders by Indigo Cross. It has four episodes. Two reviews. And 88 likes. This is unsurprising to me. Mystery is one of the most popular genres of fiction in print. It makes sense.
Number Two is is a YA romance called The Dream Heist by Christina Farley. Its pitched as Inception meets The Bourne Identity. So its high stakes, and sci fi but the question is are teens going to be using Kindle Vella? Either way, The Dream Heist has 41 episodes, 378 likes and not a single review. I couldn’t find anything on Indigo Cross, but Christina Farley has written multiple books and has a large audience of readers to pull from.
Number Three is something called Agent Gatz by R.M. Spencer. It has 33 episodes, 307 likes, and zero reviews. I suspect that its popularity largely has to do with the source material which is The Great Gatsby as it is a retelling of The Great Gatsby that sees Gatsby as a spy in World War 1.
Number Four is called Ambition by Seneca Fauls. The serial has 25 episodes, 255 likes, and zero reviews. It seems to be some kind of dystopian sci-fi romance thing?
And Number Five, for some odd reason, is something called War Core: A LitRPG, Dungeon Core Adventure. It has 43 episodes, 143 likes, and five reviews.
If there is a secret to breaking into Kindle Vella, no one has cracked it yet. Right now, it seems like pretty much anything goes. There is no niche that is more popular or trope or whatever. The only real thing you need to have is an already established audience as establishing one on the platform….I don’t know if that’s possible.
Its hard to say right now. It’s only the beginning of week three, right? So many more weeks left ahead of us for Kindle Vella to surprise everyone. Maybe the next literary internet phenomenon really is on this website.
Another Anna Todd or Colleen Hoover or even E.L. James or Beth Reekles or whatever. Who the hell knows? Its basically an infant, and we’re all trying to figure out how to get it to do what we want.
What I do know is, Dreame has been around for three years. I have a built in audience with them. And I get paid when I sign a story with them. It is hard to keep on investing in a website where nothing seems to be happening and there seems to be crickets about it on the internet.
But there’s still time. Time to write, and grow, and see. Three weeks is not enough time to see growth. Let’s give it a year. And who knows what will happen by then?
