If you caught my newsletter in June, you know I’m planning on putting some work up on Kindle Vella. It’s an experiment, as it will be for all the authors who use it since the platform isn’t even out yet. Not that serialized reading platforms, or even paid ones, are new, but this will be run by Amazon (yeah, I know) and heavily monetized, but also has the ability to reach an insanely wide audience. I have moderate to high hopes, especially if I can get in on the ground floor, but I know the work needs to be worthy of the readers, and that’s what I’m trying to do now.
I am going a little off the rails with my Vella piece. It’s not really that left field for me–female lead, supernatural setting, emphasis on romance, found families full of weirdos–but the original draft is something I wrote a few years ago and then just stashed away. Yes, it’s a dreaded vampire romance, it’s tropey, and it’s indulgent, but I needed to get it out of my system, okay? And I can’t help but feel a serialized fiction platform is exactly where the damn thing belongs!
In revising it, I’ve been nudging it closer to my current work. It’s still firmly in the urban fantasy genre, there’s plenty of blood and gore and troubled twenty-somethings and angsty longing, but the characters sometimes poke fun at their situations so…comedy? I’m sensing a tonal shift in this latest revision and then maybe another with the next, so I’m not sure exactly how it will end up, but for now, here’s the general feel in mood board form.
I know, there’s nothing haha about that mood board. That’s a mood board that screams the person who made it was alive and thriving in 2007 and had The Black Parade playing on a loop in her car. But, like, look at that font? Don’t you love it? Isn’t it so ridiculously romantic yet readable? Fuck–ridiculous but readable: that’s all I’ve ever wanted to achieve!
So, if you’ve ever read my books and been like, “okay, but I wish those characters took things a little more seriously, and why didn’t more people die, and also where was the borderline softcore torture?” well then this might be for you??? I’m not good at putting content ratings on things, but the ratio of “fucks” to word count is high, the violence is a little more explicit, and while nobody’s getting boned on the page, they’re sure thinking about it and getting close, so I’m giving it an “A” for “Adult” or “Actually I don’t know if I’m comfortable with anyone I know in real life getting a hold of this, so it’s going on a platform I know they don’t use.”
Stay tuned for “mid-to-late July” (imagine if it comes out on my birthday, oh what a gift of complimentary excitement and anxiety that would be) when Vella is slated to go live. I’ll post the finalized title and maybe an updated rating then. For now, I have to get back to wrestling this thing into some kind of recognizable shape. Probably an anatomically correct heart being handled in a very disrespectful way.
A.K. Caggiano 