I have a secret that not many are aware of, much like this website, I publish books under a pen-name. A few years ago I began to publish but the first book was a total flop – only my dad read it and it was NOT PG. Quickly, I gave up but still kept writing as I had since I was 15. It wasn’t until late last year that I put together a proof of concept book and released it that I proved this could be a do-able source of income.
Now, months later, the money is still rolling in from the tester book and I’m in the middle of releasing a non-tester novel. KDP doesn’t pay well but Amazon Kindle has a large bonus pot to pick up from by publishing in a serial format. My strategy is to release my books chapter by chapter on Kindle Vella and then, based on their terms of service, after 30 days I’m allowed to publish a full release of the book on KDP unlimited. This essentially doubles my audience and ability to capture income from the platform.
For anonymity, we will just use a number system for my books and for the sake of tracking this, we will bring the income up by KDP vs Kindle Vella and call out the books were possible.
| Month | Kindle Vella | KDP |
| Nov 2022 | 22.68 | 3.96 |
| Dec 2022 | 12.88 | 5.92 |
| Jan 2023 | 54.54 | 25.57 |
| Feb 2023 | 12.08 | 0 |
| Mar 2023 | 12 | 0 |
| Apr 2023 | 17.33 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 131.51 | 35.45 |
Because of past experience and my other creative pursuits, editing and book covers are also done by me and my AI assistant. As of February I also incur a small $10 monthly expense for publishing but it is 1000% worth it as I am able freely model and modify an AI assistant to speed up my writing. AI is not new to me as I had a hand in training the “are you human?” captcha we all love-hate so much as well as training undisclosed AI to “see” and “identify” objects in images during one of my summers in university.
