Not All Top Stories Are Promoted Equally

I finally did it! After all my hard work, I finally had one of my stories featured as a top story on vocal. I thought I wouldn’t have my work featured on the top stories page. In fact, sometimes I doubted my writing abilities because I never graced the front page. Now I’ve had three of my stories featured, so I’m pretty proud of myself.

I’ve noticed a few things since making it to top story, the first of which is the length of my stories. Vocal requires a story to be at least six hundred words to be published on their site, but the stories that were chosen to be top stories were all on the longer side. They were each over a thousand words. I can’t help but wonder if the length of my stories has anything to do with the reason they were chosen to be top stories. I’ll probably experiment with writing longer stories to test out this theory.

The other big thing that I noticed is that not all top stories are promoted equally. I had logged on Vocal’s website daily, but I hadn’t noticed that I’d made it to top stories until I looked in my wallet. I thought my story being on the top stories page would bring more eyes to my work, but it didn’t. The first story that was featured got about thirty views. Why was that? Had I written about an uninteresting topic? Did I use a bad stock photo? Why wasn’t my work catching anyone’s eye?

I know we’re mostly responsible for promoting our own work on vocal, but I expected that making it to top story would bring in a few more views. I wasn’t sure what I expected, maybe a hundred views, but it wasn’t the meager number of views that I got.

I realized I hadn’t gotten the chance to see my story on the front page, so I went looking for it on the top stories page. I noticed that there were about ten other top stories that day, which meant that my writing only stayed on the top stories page for a few hours at most. Usually, I’ll see the same top stories for an entire day, but there had been an influx of top stories on the day they featured me.

While they barely featured my stories, there’s currently a story that’s been the top story for the past three days. This means that more people have visited the website and seen this story on the front page, especially since it’s the weekend. The story that’s currently on the front page is going to get more clicks than a story that’s only featured for an hour on Monday.

It’s possible that the vocal staff gets weekends off and approved a handful of stories before leaving for the weekend, but I think featuring a handful of stories for days at a time is unfair. I know it’s not the creator’s fault, but it seems like vocal is promoting this story more than it did to others.

Vocal has been notorious for their long wait times when approving stories, but recently they’ve been approving my stories almost instantly. Does that mean I should submit my longer stories on Friday so that I have a better chance of my story being a top story for a longer period of time?

Despite only being featured on the top stories page for a few hours, I’m still proud of my accomplishment. I’ve always wanted to be recognized for my writing, and now I feel like I have been. I can only hope that Vocal continues to promote and recognize my writing, but if they don’t, it’s not a big deal.

I don’t need vocal or any other website to recognize my writing for me to know it’s worthy of being viewed. I put my all into my writing and will continue to do so.