Spooky, Scary Serials

The Writing Forge

In this twofold Halloween episode Miranda and Bonnie talk with Steve Anderson about how to write for Kindle Vella as well as how to write spooky stories.

This week’s question: Have you tried out Kindle Vella? Let us know of any stories you’ve liked and link them at our socials!

Tips and Tricks:

• Kindle Vella is a new(ish) platform on Amazon that specializes in serialized content and is separate from Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Direct Publishing.
• As it is a serialized platform, the sweet spot for views and reads seems to be for the author to post about 2 -3 short “episodes” per week. About 1,000 to 2,000 words per episode, with lower 1,000s being preferable.
• When writing for Kindle Vella, it’s helpful to think of the episode as a cable TV show with commercial breaks built in. Where there would be a commercial break, that’s usually a good place to stop the episode.
• Episodes cost tokens and readers spend tokens to unlock the next episode. Different episodes cost different amounts.
• Horror, spooky, and suspenseful stories all share common traits.
• For tension, you want to feed your readers enough information to get them anticipating the next step in the story. From there you can twist the story if you’d like. You want to aim for “surprising yet inevitable.”
• Managing to generate a sense of unease or that something is “off” is a great way to build up the spooky factor of a story.
• Vella seems to be a rather ideal platform for ratcheting tension in a story, especially for stories along the lines of mystery and horror.

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Cover art by Maggie Walker

Links:

Steve’s paranormal mystery serial, If These Walls Could Talk: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B09WKDR3S4

Rise: An Anthology of Change, containing Miranda’s spooky short story: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Anthology-Change-Bonnie-McKnight/dp/0578577593/

Supernatural (TV show): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460681/

Castle (TV show): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1219024/

Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: https://www.goodreads.com/series/40346-the-dresden-files

The Others (movie): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0230600/

More on “surprising yet inevitable”: https://writingexcuses.com/tag/surprising-yet-inevitable/