Shadows of Sin

And the tough choices authors have to make about publishing

Several years ago, I worked as a staff writer for a very well-known romance app. In some months, I wrote a full-length novel’s worth of content. The job was fun! I got to write hilarious antics, diverse sex scenes, and I got paid to make content that I didn’t have to spend a penny to publish!

Of course, I didn’t get any credit or royalties for the work. I was paid a flat fee per word and when I handed in my drafts, I was done. An editing team took over the project from there, and I never once had notes or revisions sent back to me. (Phew!)

The series I wrote for was very, very popular. In the first few months it was live on the app it went from 12,000 views to several million. By the time I left the position two years later, the series I wrote (at times as part of a writing team, and for several months over the two years I was the sole writer) had earned more than 40 million views.

40 million views!!

Working on that series was busy. Frantic, even. I have always juggled a lot of projects as a freelancer, but I pulled a lot of long weekends and late nights to make sure the sexy hijinks I wrote on that series were the best they could be.

But writing as someone else, for someone else lit a fire in me. Those 40 million views were on my words…and I didn’t earn enough per month writing to pay even half my rent. I wondered if I could do it for myself. Write my own serialized stories.

Now, not everyone loves serialized stories, but after writing for that app for so many years, I truly enjoyed the format. Short chapters (episodes), multiple points of view, always someone new and something interesting going on… It was a fun and really engaging way to write. So I turned a novel I had into a series and published it on Kindle Vella, a platform for serial fiction. I went on Vella went the site went live, and my series (thanks to some luck and timing and fairy dust) did really, really well.

This is the quirky little series that started it all! Cover by the same artist I work with now, Matt Hubel.

Amazon ran ads promoting my series. I ranked in the top 25 of all series on the platform for the first 12 months the series was live. And then, like everything does, things changed. The platform changed. More great writers and stories came onto the platform. And the genre that I had decided to serialize was getting drowned out by romance!

That was okay with me. As much as I adored my quirky little zombie project, writing horror week after week at that pace (I was writing about 10,000 words a week for a year) was EXHAUSTING. I love zombies, but I was ready to launch my own romance content. I could still write monsters, but I would just put them into an epic fantasy setting.

But while I published my fantasy romances on Kindle Unlimited, I toyed with the idea of trying one of the books I had in the works as a series on Vella. The series was basically an epic fantasy version of Sons of Anarchy. Instead of motorcycles, these bad guys in a massively powerful crime family rode horses. There was a unique magic system and a plant that gave the family its unparalleled wealth. Three half brothers, all bound by crime and wealth and lust, each with different mothers and secret backstories. In the opening episode, their father, Lord Baer Baynne, is caught not only sleeping with his oldest son’s wife, but he was planning to murder his own son so he could be with his pregnant daughter-in-law. Heady stuff, right?

But I LOVED it. There was unrequited love and vampires and even a series crossover. (Neo and Syndrian from Dishonor Among Thieves and Lover’s Leap make cameos!) I published 25 episodes of Wraith on Vella when more changes were rolled out. And then more.

Amazon changed the compensation structure for all series on the platform. Last week, a reader unlocked the first eleven episodes of my zombie series. Translated into pages, those eleven episodes come out to about 140 printed pages. After the new changes Amazon made to Vella, guess how much I earned for those 140 pages being read of my series?

5 cents.

I know writers have very strong opinions about their art and the value of their art. I’m always tremendously grateful when anyone reads me work. Being paid a fair wage for that work, though, is of course important. What is fair?

That’s for each one of us to decide. I am going to leave that zombie series on Vella and count the pennies it earns. I’m not marketing it, and I’m not likely to write more of the series any time soon.

But I took Wraith down immediately. I had bigger plans for that story. Bigger than what it could be as a series on Vella. I gave a little heads up here a few months ago that Wraith would be coming down, and I appreciate if you read it before it left Vella.

But now, my dark, angsty, erotic crime series is in my active drafts. I’m working to expand the storylines and organize the content into books that readers can access on KU. I have the cover done, and I hope to have the pre-order for the book available in the next month or two.

For now, I’m tremendously grateful for the confidence that Vella gave me. Total strangers read my quirky Los Angeles zombie series. I received fan DMs, was invited on YouTube shows and podcasts, and received messages from people who loved that story and begged me to write more. (I took a pause at the end of Season One which was about 250,000 words long!)

But things change fast in publishing. Platforms that are popular lose favor with readers or authors. Trends come and go. No matter what, I’m grateful to you. To readers who support my work and who listen to my podcast. To fans and friends alike who read my 40+ million view series and said, “Callie! You’ve got to publish your own stuff!”

The business of writing is hard, but the benefits of creating stories and connecting with readers and writer friends… There’s nothing I’d rather do. Except maybe fake date a secret prince who’s actually a vampire.

I’m hard at work in my freelance practice and editing both Broken Bloodlines and Wraith for release this year. I’ve been accepted to more author signings and events for 2025, which I’ll share as those events come closer. But for now, this is a thank you as well as a goodbye of sorts.

In taking Wraith off Kindle Vella, I’m leaving behind the platform that made me a writer. ME. Not the pseudonym whose work had 40 million reads. But me. The woman behind the words. The woman who works very, very hard for every penny of my reader’s hard-earned coins that are spent to purchase my work on whatever platform I’m on.

I pray someday my own work will be read at the scale my other series have been. I appreciate the five cents I’ve earned even as I work harder to grow more, write better, and earn the trust and loyalty of more readers.

I have a lot of work to do and a lot of words to write to get there. And every step of the way, I’m so grateful, truly, deeply grateful, that you’re here for the journey.