Invasion Nation: A Kindle Vella story

We’ll start with the news first, which is that I have a new story available right now called Invasion Nation. You can find it in only one place and in only one format, which is right here.

Now let’s back up and talk about where that link sends you and what you’re looking at.

What is Kindle Vella?

Kindle Vella is a newly created platform from Amazon that’s intended specifically for stories published in serial form. Vella stories are presented in short episodes (between 600 and 5,000 words) meant to be consumed on mobile devices like cellphones. This is to fill a market need whose existence was already established by other serial platforms like Wattpad.

Vella is still a very new platform and this is clearly something of a soft rollout right now. Note for instance that it’s only available in two ways: on iOS (through the Amazon app), or online through Amazon.com. It’s also currently not available for readers (and authors) outside of the United States.

Entertainingly, despite the name, it is also not currently available on Amazon Kindles.

I expect all of that to change shortly.

What is Invasion Nation?

Amazon first announced the launching of Vella in early May. Intrigued by the concept, I decided to start writing a serial called Invasion Nation. This is, right now, an open-ended alien invasion story, meaning I don’t know how it’s going to end, how long it will go, or what will happen next.

(If this sounds alarming to you, understand that I basically wrote all my novels like this.)

There are ten episodes available right now, with another eight finished and pending scheduling. I plan to roll out one new episode a week.

Here’s the logline:

It’s been five years since the day the aliens appeared out of nowhere and proceeded to annihilate nearly every member of the grossly unprepared human race. Now it’s up to a handful of survivors–the remnants–to figure out not just how to stay alive, but how to strike back. Dor is one such survivor. She’s made it this far thanks to a lot of smarts and a little luck. And something more. Because there’s something a little different about Dor… whether she knows it or not.

Please do jump over to Invasion Nation and check it out. The first three episodes are free, and Amazon is also giving away 200 tokens to get everyone started. Also, if you like what you’ve read, click that thumbs-up! “Faves” (yes, I hate that they’re called that too) help the story get exposure.

Final note: One of the things that’s really cool about this new platform is that there’s no prohibition to taking a story and publishing it in novel form after it’s finished. I may use this in the future for novels I mean to self-publish later.


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2 Comments

  1. Lynn on December 5, 2021 at 8:46 am

    Why have you stopped adding episodes?

    • Gene Doucette on December 5, 2021 at 8:56 am

      I keep meaning to put up a blog post about this! A couple of reasons. I tried to schedule a new entry to post back when I was on schedule to do so, and Amazon kept rejecting it, saying (with no elaboration at all) that it needed to be changed before it could be published. Combining that with the clear evidence that Vella was simply not being properly supported by Amazon itself (I can’t even list the story on my author page on Amazon) and it just didn’t seem worth it to keep banging my head against the wall for a product that looked like it was going to fail. I will likely take down the story and turn it into a novel, I just haven’t found the bandwidth to do that yet.

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