So, I did a thing. I’ve been curious about Kindle Vella since it came out and decided to give it a go. I had a fiction project I’ve been thinking about for a while and instead of publishing it as a book I thought I’d use Kindle Vella to tell the story. If you’re not familiar with Kindle Vella, no worries. It’s really new and lots of people know little about it. After I tell you a little about Falling Down the Sissy Rabbit Hole, my first serialized Kindle Vella story, I’ll tell you all about the platform and how to use it.
Context of The Story
Those who identify as sissy often see this in a multiplicity of usages, meanings, and implications that cuts across identities, roles, presentations, orientations, and preferences. This one word can communicate much about who they are, how they see themselves, and how they relate to intimate and romantic partners and the larger world.
Part of being a writer is doing research and while I’ve researched the topic, I’m on the outside looking in so I don’t pretend to know everything about the term sissy or those who adopt the label. But one thing I have learned is you can visit a hundred different sissy sites and get a hundred different perspectives on what being a sissy is. To write a fictional story, you don’t have to get involved in all the minutiae. You just have to establish a context for the story so people can understand what it’s about. So, here it is. I use the term sissy simply to describe people who were assigned male at birth and embrace feminine roles and/or expression. The story is merely a work of fiction that features a cis male person who finds himself in a situation where a dominant woman uses forced feminization as a means of discipline and humiliation to assert her control over him. My aim is to tell an erotic story that people will find entertaining using a little comedic relief against the backdrop of the practice of forced feminization and what it can entail.
Down The Sissy Rabbit Hole Summary
The reminiscences of a young adult man recalling the shocking and comedic adventures and experiences of his misspent youth to tell the story of how being taken in hand by a young, dominant governess changed his life forever.
After a third fashionable preparatory school expels him for chronic misbehavior, sixteen-year-old Brian Dawson continues his rebellious and delinquent ways after arriving home. When a female guest in the family home walks into her room to find Brian prowling through her drawers and taking indecent liberties with her lingerie, his parents decide it’s the final straw. On the advice of a family friend, Brian’s parents send him to live with a young, uncompromising governess, her female staff, and her three teenage female charges. When he rebels against the authority of his new governess, Brian quickly becomes Brianna when his governess, Miss Abby Pierpont, forces him to wear girls’ clothing as his usual attire, and punishes his misdeeds with frequent flagellation. Later, because of his youthful experiences, Brian continues to submit to dominant women as an adult through forced feminization and cross-dressing. A modern tale of petticoat discipline and enforced chastity.
About Amazon Kindle Vella
Kindle Vella is relatively new to the market. It’s a platform and reading service that allows you to read serialized fiction written specifically for Kindle Vella. Serialization is the act of breaking a story into chapters (called episodes) and posting new chapters at intervals, just like a television series. Serialized fiction isn’t new. Classic writers like Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle all used the serialization format for their fiction. And now, this return to the origins of the novel seems to be regaining its popularity. There are many other sites that offer serialized fiction. Kindle Vella is just Amazon’s entry into the market.
How Kindle Vella Works
Kindle Vella stories are currently only available in the US to both readers and writers, and you can only read the stories on Amazon’s Kindle Vella website or with an iOS app. Currently, there is no Android compatibility or the capability to read the stories on a Kindle e-reader. Amazon and others in the serialized fiction market purposefully designed their serialized fiction platforms for people who like to read on the go on their smartphones.
Each episode can be anywhere from 600 to 5,000 words, making Vella stories perfect for people who enjoy reading while commuting to work or during their breaks, but rarely have time to sit down to read an entire novel. You get the stories in bite-size episodes you can easily read in only a few minutes. You can even subscribe, so you receive notifications when new episodes become available. Also, you can read the first few (usually three) episodes free, so you get the chance to decide whether you want to continue reading a story before you ever have to pay.
Paying for Episodes
If you find a story, you enjoy and want to continue reading after finishing the free episodes, then you buy them an episode at a time. The payment model is also different from purchasing eBooks from Amazon. You pay for Vella story episodes with tokens that you purchase in bundles. The bigger the bundle you buy, the cheaper the tokens are. And it’s a fairly cheap way to read. The cost of an episode is based on word count, with the general rule being it costs one token per 100 words. So a 600-word episode costs around six tokens. The smallest bundle Amazon sells is 200 tokens for $1.99. That’s about $2.00 for 20,000 words of content, or about a penny per token using the smallest bundle as an example. Amazon also sells other bundles. 368 tokens are $4.99, 770 tokens are $9.99, and 1,500 tokens are $14.99 when purchased via the mobile app. Web pricing is a better value, offering 525, 1,100, and 1,700 tokens at the same respective price points.
Why I Chose Vella For Down The Sissy Rabbit Hole
Mostly, I chose Kindle Vella for this story because I was curious to experience firsthand how the platform works. Also, it’s an opportunity to access another group of readers, those who only have the time to read 600 to 5,000 words at a sitting and like the idea of serialized fiction. Vella is no get rich scheme for writers since they earn only fractions of a cent per word for their stories. But it’s another way to give value to readers and hopefully find new ones.
There are some other issues for writers unique to the platform. The stories are hard to find since Amazon only promotes the most popular Vella stories. So, writers who don’t get the word out about their stories may not get any reads at all because no one will know their stories even exist. So, that’s one motivation behind this post. And that segues into the next topic.
Reader Interaction With Kindle Vella Stories
One unique thing about Kindle Vella is that readers have many ways to interact with and support stories they enjoy reading. You can “like” stories by clicking a button similar to liking content on social media websites. You can “favorite” stories by clicking another button, and you can post reviews if you wish. These actions all help elevate the visibility of stories on the platform so that more readers find them. If you are reading a story you enjoy, why not help other readers find it? Also, supporting a writer whose work you enjoy reading will encourage them to write more episodes and maybe release new episodes more often. So, if Down The Sissy Rabbit Hole sounds like something you might enjoy reading, if you try out Kindle Vella and read any episodes, even the free ones, I’d be sincerely grateful for any likes, favorites, or reviews if you enjoy the episodes.
What To Expect From Down The Sissy Rabbit Hole
“Petticoating” is a relatively recent discovery for me and I find it intriguing from a kink perspective because it pairs well with enforced chastity and Femdom in general, both topics near and dear to my heart. When I first thought about writing an erotica story using petticoating and the forced feminization aspects of it as the theme, originally I planned to write a full length novella. So, I’m committed to writing and publishing enough episodes to reach novella length, regardless of how many reads the story gets. So far, I’ve published four episodes, three of which are free. And I plan to publish a new episode of between 600 to 1500 words each week (every Thursday) until I finish the story.
You can visit the Kindle Vella Down The Sissy Rabbit Hole page to learn more by clicking the orange button below the story summary above, or by clicking this link: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B0BC4VS4PD
