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Amazon's Kindle Vella - A "Mid-Morten"
Amazon’s newest Kindle experiment is the serialization project called Kindle Vella. It launched (soft-launched?) in July 2021, and I decided to drop a couple of projects I had spinning around into it. Each is a good-sized tale with escalating stakes and should be a perfect fit for the episodic treatment. Stranded is from the Arcane Universe and the first in the United Series, set in groovy 1968. And Monster Zoo is a horror thrill ride, trapped inside a theme park meltdown of monumental proportions.
So … Kindle what? Vella, as in … Yeah, I give up, too.
Anyway. The gist, or so it seems, since Amazon has been even more vague and shallow about their intent for it than most everything else they keep shrouded in corporate secrecy, is to create a serialized platform tailored to phone readers (it appears?). Folks who have small chunks of time in their days, where catching up on the latest drop of a story would scratch the daily itch of someone who might prefer following along to an ongoing longform narrative to surfing through their other feeds.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SESSION INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
The Dancing Librarian’s Bulletin Board for Frolicking Fun Reads is a real world real corkboard, littered with book reviews, in a real world library, for real world readers. She writes them mostly for fantasy and science fiction releases, and tuned toward the young adult audience.
The following is a transcript from a Questions and Answers portion of a live interview we did, where I talk about writing, my books, my process, and other interesting writerly things.
Dancing Librarian: Hello, and please welcome Sean O’Donnell, author of the Sage and the Arcane Order series, with the first Trilogy, called Elevation, of a planned five trilogy series arc. He also has a standalone book set in the same Universe, called Dacha Rising.
Sean O’Donnell: Thank you for having me. And thank you for reading and reviewing my books. Even if you don’t have a blog online, where you can post them for the world to see. (laughs)
DL: Yes, I know I’m beyond old-fashioned.
SO: Only kidding. Even though you have computers and ebooks and an awesome blu-ray section here, the stacks of books are still my favorite thing to browse through here. And reading in-house reviews of books is what makes this place, and libraries everywhere, so great.
DL: Giving recommendations is my favorite part of the job. And reading great books written by ... (READ THE INTERVIEW)
Yes, rating a book or leaving a review is easy!
Rating books (you know, the gold stars thing) is an easy way to say Thank You to an author.
At the same time, positive ratings may be the final push a browsing reader needs to take a plunge on a new author.
Ratings are also key in prompting Amazon to throw some extra promotional push into the book. That's why ratings (and leaving longer reviews, if you are inclined) are way more important than most readers realize.
Even the short and sweet reviews go a long ways.
And the process is pretty painless!
Let me walk you through it.
Helpful Reviews - Why Rate or Review a Book?
In this day and age, ratings and reviews are as big a part of people deciding whether to purchase a product, see a movie, or eat at a new restaurant as they have ever been. Possibly even more so. Ratings and reviews are important, and today the individual has a louder voice than ever before.
And good reviews are both influential and exponential.
Within newspapers and magazines, on television and radio; book reviews are dwindling and becoming scarcer. Readership and viewership itself is on the move. More and more people are turning to the customer ratings and reviews found online to help make informed decisions about what they are considering.
Rating Stars and Reviews are everywhere!
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