naomishibles
Apr 13, 20232 min
One of the talented members of my writing group publishes on Amazon’s Kindle Vella. If you’re not familiar with the service, it is a place for readers to find serialized stories, usually novella-length. (I assume that “Vella” comes from “novella.”) Writers can publish their stories in segments like they used to do in old magazines.
During one of our monthly check-ins, the Vella writer told our group about her process, and I was gobsmacked. The sheer precision of her schedule might as well have been engineered in Germany. That’s when it hit me: if I want to be a successful author in this day and age, I need to get my own process and schedule together.
I might not intend to publish on Vella, but I certainly have a lot to learn about writing discipline. With each manuscript I write, I try to be more organized, structured, and swift.
I simply don’t have decades to write all that I want to write.
As an experiment, I’m practicing streamlining a publishing process of sorts through creating a series of coloring books and publishing them on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
*Does anyone else wonder if we’ll all be working for or with Amazon sooner or later?*
The first attempt, The Bun Family Coloring Book, took me about two weeks to draw, format, and revise until KDP accepted it. I hoped to have it live by Easter—alas, I kept messing up the formatting and missed that seasonal opportunity. However, it’s now available on Amazon.
Next, I took the basic drawings of the characters and altered them for the next edition, Buns Around the World. Since I already had the formatted pages and cover to work with, I was able to create and submit it in three days. (It is still under review as of this writing. I had to resubmit the cover because a character image in front of the title flagged it.)
I hope to produce the next coloring book in two days or less.
I learned that I could link the two coloring books together as a series so that they show up together in Amazon searches. Over time, as I build this series’s offerings, I will analyze if the bundle of products is more successful than my standalone workbook, This One’s For You, Messy Kid.
Yes, drawing pictures of bunnies is easier than writing a novel, but sometimes it pays to learn a process simply, and then apply that knowledge to a more complex model. That’s my plan, anyway.
I’ll let you know how it works out!