I don't think this is going to work out

So I've been here a couple of months, and when I joined I was honestly led to believe that Vocal had a strong reader base. So when I got few if any readers I just figured it was the same problem I'd had throughout my entire writing career: no matter how professional or how much I hyped it up, I could not pay strangers, family, or friends to read what I wrote. Eventually even my trusty editors became too busy. It wasn't Vocal, it was my continued curse of being the writer who was never read.

I was ecstatic when I read about the Vocal Facebook groups. Whenever I heard of another group, I joined it right away, trying to be as active as I could within that group's parameters. I realized others had the same problem: Vocal had no reader base but the writers within it. This made sense, as the only advertising it really did was the contests for writers. This also, in a way, made sense. Vocal doesn't have a paid subscribership for readers, it has Vocal plus for writers. Although writers make their money off of who is reading their posts, Vocal makes money only off of who is writing them.

I could try to make all of the writing friends I could on the Facebook groups, post my articles regularly and hope to word the introductions to them well (this became especially hard with a story with a lot of twists, I couldn't say hardly anything that was good about the story without ruining it. I just needed people to trust me.) so people would click. After this I would beg anyone who read to give me any kind of feedback.

I had a free Vocal plus for a month and while I did I saw a rise in numbers... what I was surprised to see was those numbers didn't stay after the subscription was gone. The money I earned- around sixty cents (oh my gosh, big spender) went back down to what it would have been had I not tested what the Vocal plus subscription was. At least it let me know for certain that I wouldn't be earning the subscription either way! I will miss being able to participate in more challenges though, but as a disabled person I can't allow myself to pay money when there are free writing competitions. I could also at this moment be working on things for a video game or a book or two, all things I’ve been avoiding these two months I’ve been writing articles and reading articles instead.

I've loved writing here, and I knew when I started that I would likely never get paid, because I've joined places with similar systems. What I didn't expect was that the idea of community would be so hard to foster and find, readers would be non-existent unless you wrote about a popular fandom and directly tweeted them, and that I would only feel worse about myself, two months in. I was never writing for readers, don't misunderstand me. But until I joined the Facebook groups I was regularly not being read at all, or once. Now that I'm sort of old hat there, it's gone back to the same numbers. I love giving feedback, helping others grow. I only wish I knew what was so wrong with my writing that made it so unpopular. I’ve been at the sides of great writers my entire life learning the many ways to make great fiction (none of them really agree on that, by the way) I’ve always wanted to be better.

So I guess what I’m saying is, Vocal, it’s not just me, it’s us.