Amazon's Kindle Vella through the eyes of a longtime Seattle author

Fred Moody is a retired journalist in the Seattle area, the former managing editor of Seattle Weekly, and the author of a series on Kindle Vella, Amazon’s new episodic storytelling platform for mobile devices. It's called Barfly on the Wall: A meteoric misadventure into Seattle bartending.  

GeekWire's Todd Bishop has been looking into Kindle Vella and other story platforms as a reflection of broader changes in how people publish and read stories. Moody is one of the authors featured in a GeekWire story on the subject.

Moody has followed Amazon since its early days as an online bookseller, interviewing Jeff Bezos for an article when the company was based in a modest office south of downtown Seattle. The company was so small at the time that Bezos personally followed up with Moody to explain how the journalist's out-of-print book about the Seattle Seahawks ended up in Amazon's online catalog.

"He was talking about why he was located in Seattle, and what his plans were, to be the world's biggest bookstore and all that, but there was no sense that they were headed where they were headed, at least not to my benighted eyes," Moody recalled this week. "You could tell he was really onto something, but nobody could have imagined what that something was."

In 2004, as the tech economy was taking off in the city, Moody wrote about Seattle's "struggle for its soul" in his book, Seattle and the Demons of Ambition. That book was inspired in part by his experience encountering protesters during the World Trade Organization riots, which opened his eyes to Seattle's evolution into a "massive establishment symbol with all this corporate power," as he puts it.

More than a decade later, in 2015, his eyes were opened to yet another side of the city when he came out of retirement to work as a day-shift bartender at the Shanghai Room in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood, which his daughter Caitlin and son-in-law Tony took over when they opened the adjacent North Star Diner. (They stepped down as owner/operators earlier this year.)

Moody started taking notes about the characters at the bar, the people he worked with, and his experiences with the late Anthony Bourdain and his crew when the famed chef and television host visited Seattle for his final show here.

When the pandemic hit, Moody found himself with the time to write.

"I wanted to experiment with a different kind of narrative, where I'm telling these short little pieces, sometimes anecdotes, sometimes conversations, or little pieces from people's lives, then just kind of jumping from one to the other," he explained, describing it as "a mosaic" that builds into a larger narrative.

Then he heard about Vella.

"It was almost like a perfect format for what I'd been doing," he said. "I could just take these bite-sized, little things, and make these episodes."

Vella also matched the trends he had witnessed from behind the bar.

"I was really taken with the idea that it would be so phone-friendly, because the audience I was thinking about for this book were people that read exclusively on their phones, which I noticed in my bartending was the case with almost everybody under 40 years old," he said.

Read the full story on GeekWire.

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