How to get a Top Story

At least most of us know the feeling right? That moment when you’re checking your Vocal notifications, you start reading the comment section on one of your latest stories and you see people congratulating you on your top story. A rush of energy and dopamine overwhelms your emotions. You’re like a little kid inside all over again and you have a cheesy grin on your face that’s forced it’s way there and refuses to leave. Yeah, that’s top story energy.

Most of us know the glory of having a top story. Some of us actually don’t, believe it or not. For those of us who haven’t had top stories yet, we really want to know how to get one. Even those of us who have had top stories aren’t fully aware of how it came to be and would like to know what was it we did that made us front page news, got us a bunch of reads, got us a five dollar bonus, and a new wave of subscribers. Let’s break down this process to getting a top story.

If I may, let me share how I earned my earliest top stories. So I first became a member of Vocal just last year. Maybe like a month and some change into my first year on Vocal the infamous date of Friday the 13th came around and being that I am a big fan of the Friday the 13th movie series I was inspired to write an article about the history and impact of the movie franchise and so I did. I had a lot of fun writing it too. It was probably two or three weeks after writing it that I checked my Vocal wallet for the first time ever and saw that I had been given a five dollar bonus for my top story “Friday the 13th: Impact of a Legend”.

I can honestly say I wasn’t overly ecstatic about this gift and title of “Top Story” because at the time I didn’t even know what a top story was or that I could even get one, so it was really just a new interesting perk to me of being a writer on Vocal. It wasn’t until like another month and some change later in June when I earned my second top story for a Juneteenth inspired poem that I wrote dedicated to Harriet Tubman called “Harriet: Rebel of the Underground Railroad” that I started paying attention to the significance of getting a top story.

After earning my second top story it was like every single story that I wrote afterwards was an attempt to get a new top story. This also made it harder of course because I cared alot more, so I was overly invested in the idea. In all that time since earning my first two top stories I have now earned seven more top stories and I can honestly say it’s been a bizarre, yet fortunate process as to how it all came to be. Now here goes the million dollar answer to the million dollar question: How does one get a top story?

I really hate to wet the anti-climatic paper for you folks, but there is no simple answer to this riddle. At the end of the day there is no one or multiple mandate criteria that dictates how you get a top story on Vocal. I have had nine top stories on Vocal in the one year that I’ve been a member and I can honestly say that I didn’t expect any of them to become top stories even when that was the goal I was aiming for when writing them. Nearly half of my top stories are stories that I didn’t think were all that good and worthy to be top stories or stories that I really didn’t even care about all that much, yet why did they become top stories? Because of how they appealed to the writing community. Adversely, there are plenty of stories that I’ve written that didn’t get a fraction of the attention that some of my top stories had and I was a bit disappointed and surprised when they didn’t become top stories.

This is what we have to remember as writers in this community. We can’t control how appealing our stories are in the minds of others, which is exactly how a top story is awarded: by how appealing it is to those who read these stories.m, so we can’t control what becomes a top story and what doesn’t and that’s okay because we aren’t writing for the accolades such as a top story, we’re writing because it’s who we are and what we love. I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about having a top story or that having one doesn’t matter, because it definitely does help expand your presence in the Vocal community, but that shouldn’t be your main goal in being here.

This is how you get a top story: just do the best you can as the writer you are and let your work speak for itself in the hearts and minds of those who read your stories.

~~Dedicated to all who want that top story. Don’t worry, your time is coming.