Elliot Kessler

Today marks one year since I finished my first novel: Liar’s Legacy! I am very proud of the story I put onto the page and proud to have a novel for others to pick up and enjoy.

However, it hasn’t been easy to share my novel.

I wrote Liar’s Legacy in a serialized format for a new Amazon service called Kindle Vella. For those who don’t know, Kindle Vella is like other applications for serialized storytelling, like Wattpad and Raddish. Authors can publish their stories one chapter at a time, and the chapters are purchased separately.

Kindle Vella is a little different, however. Instead of simply purchasing episodes, you must purchase packs of tokens used to unlock episodes. It’s like purchasing gold in a video game with real money to buy game items with said gold, then. But, instead of buying your character a brand-new helmet, you’re buying the next chapter of a web novel.

This system is, apparently, not very user-friendly. Many of my friends and family did not understand how to purchase my book, and so only two people have read it all the way through.

With this rerelease, the book will be available in ebook format rather than the serialized, episodic format it’s in now. This will make it much more accessible to a broader range of readers.

The book will also feature a brand-new cover and chapters rewritten from the ground up. There is a new side plot that I hope you will enjoy, and I hope it makes the characters more relatable. It will especially help with Ben, and I think it will show a new side of the character that wasn’t seen in the previous version.

Ben’s character was not defined well in the Kindle Vella edition. The whole novel was not developed as much as it should have been. My goal was to finish the novel before the Kindle Vella service was released, leading to the story’s writing with an underdeveloped outline and underdeveloped characters. I was not prepared enough before I began writing. I didn’t even finish the whole outline when the first few chapters were written.

The ending was continuously in flux. It kept changing as the story went on, and I was not sure what the fate of the characters would be until the final chapter was finished.

Now, I understand the story much better and who the characters should be. The plot has been in the back of my mind for the last year, and I am much more familiar with it than when I first put words on the page.

While writing my novel, I began to get tired of the story. I was thinking of it constantly and lacked confidence in my storytelling ability. I thought it was bad and only wanted to be done with it. This is apparent in the middle chapters, chapters six and seven being the worst offenders.

The episodes were rushed, botched stories with no heart and inconsistent characters. This was partly due to inexperience, but most resulted from impatience and frustration. I didn’t want to write the novel anymore.

Frankly, the story should have been novella-length. It didn’t have enough substance to be a full novel, so it gets slow and dull in some places. I added a lot of fluff, and a handful of chapters are about nonsense. I hope to remedy this error by adding more character development in every chapter, and I will give you guys different sides of the main trio.

This book has been a journey, and I’m proud to be able to come back to it and give some of these chapters the rewrites they deserve. I cannot wait to bring this story to a broader audience, and I cannot wait to give you guys the refined version of my first novel.

The rerelease of Liar’s Legacy will be on Amazon on April 12.

Thanks for reading! Have a great day.