Back To The Numbers

Introduction

This is prompted by the tumbling of reads since the Vocal upgrade, which is still causing a lot of issues, but I am one of the lucky ones because I can still publish, but am unable to request a withdrawal (although I am not depending on the coffee money from Vocal).

These are observations and notes on my book sales (tiny), blog visits (not reads, but for me huge), my YouTube Channel ( more than reasonable for me), and, of course, my Vocal reads.

My Books

I always wanted to write a book, and now I have seventeen self-published on Amazon. It's thanks to Vocal that I managed to get on the self-publishing train, and this is the story of how it happened.

That averages at one sale a week, so I am no Terry Pratchett or Stephen King, but I achieved my goal, and you can check out my hardcopy here.

My Pixabay

I "create" AI Art on Nightcafe and take a lot of photographs, and the ones I like, I share on Pixabay. While I give them away, I have also received about $100 in tips from people who like what I have shared.

While I have six thousand likes on my 1,110 images, there have been over 80,000 downloads. Would you download something if you didn't like it? C'est la vie.

If you need some free images, check out my page here:

My YouTube Channel

I only share on here sporadically, but have nearly 300 subscribers and over a quarter of a million views. I cannot monetise it because I need a thousand subscribers, but I am happy that it allows me to share my attempts at singing, playing, videos of places I have been, and slideshows.

Although I have quarter of a million views, 160,000 of those have come from the Christopher Lee slideshow:

My channel is here:

My Blog (Seven Days In)

I started on this twenty years back and have never made much money from it. When I started on Vocal, I thought my blogging was going to stop. In my first year on Vocal, my blog got twenty posts; however, I started posting about books I was reading, and you can see that since 2023 figures have climbed significantly. It is now closing in on three million visits.

Note these are visits, probably from bots. You will also notice that I have had 14 comments and got six followers on the blog, and that is in twenty years.

One side effect is that the AdSense adverts are generating money, £5 a month in the last two months, meaning I will get a payment this month of £61, which I wasn't expecting to achieve until the end of the year. My last payment was in 2018.

The £60 payment threshold is about $120, so Vocal's payment thresholds are more than reasonable in comparison.

My blog is here, but there are a lot of annoying pop-ups that you can get rid of, but they generate me coffee money.

My Vocal Reads

Since the Vocal upgrade, my monthly reads had dropped to below a thousand. Last November, they dropped to six hundred when I could not publish, but today they limped over the thousand mark.

I am wondering why they have bothered to waste the space to put your most-read story when it is at the top of your stats list, and nobody else can see it. Obviously, far more important than sorting out the verification issue.

You can see how the reads dipped after the update, and I assume that the same thing happened for everyone on Vocal. Also, I am aware that many people still cannot get onto their account, and that because they are trying to sort out their own account, they don't have time to read other Creators' work.

I think I may be moving in the right direction, and it is nice to see my balance growing, even though I cannot request a withdrawal, like one of those long-term savings accounts, but I do need a cup of coffee.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading. I truly appreciate your support.

The music is "Counting Out Time" by Genesis because it mentions a lot of numbers and has a dwarf guitar.