On Vocal Subscriptions

Introduction

I am writing this after the introduction of two new positive Vocal initiatives, although Subscriptions is an older initiative which I am slowly starting to use more and more though possibly not in the way that most people use them.

The New Vocal Initiatives

The first is the podcast, and while I am not a podcast person in the same way that I am not an audiobook person, because when I listen I tend to listen to music although I have listened to the odd fictional podcast/audiobook.

I know lots of my Vocal friends will find this invaluable plus Dane BH and Jim Delaney-Howe have been involved in the initial rollout that you can read here.

The second is the Vocal app which will be very useful to me because at the moment all my Vocal device interactions are via Twitter, browser and email and it will be so good to just have one app that I can go to for my Vocal needs. You can read the full story below and am sure that everyone will be very excited about this.

Vocal Subscriptions

When Vocal introduced Subscriptions I think there were visions of getting regular readers for our stories. I soon realised as I subscribed to new creators who had written stories that impressed me that I could not possibly keep up with the stories that they wrote.

I was already doing a bit of this in the Facebook Groups (see the end of this article for a list of them in poetic format) and whenever I subscribed I let the people know because Vocal just tells you how many subscribers you have but not who they are. I am subscribed to 480 Vocal creators and 85 of those have posted in the last week although one of my subscriptions has not posted in three years, although we are friends and communicate sporadically on Instagram.

85 posts in a week should be a manageable read count for me but I most often read via the Facebook Groups and Vocal Top Stories, tending to use the Your Feed option on Subscriptions if I see nothing that takes my fancy in the first two sources. At the best guess using the “Stories You Liked” feature I have read about 80 Vocal stories this week but they are unlikely to match my Subscriptions.

I have 320 Subscribers and if ten per cent of those read my stories each day I would be getting a healthy thirty reads a day although my reads fluctuate wildly between 10 and 150 a day. I went through my subscriptions and noticed there were a lot called “Test” which is creators who have left Vocal and I am wondering if I have subscribers in my count who have left too.

The Benefits I Take From My Vocal Subscriptions

In the latest Vocal improvements, there is mention of limiting some of your content to your subscribers, but I will not be doing that, I want my content to be available to everyone effectively for free. If I want you to pay me for my writing I will release my content as a book which you can buy, or you can send me a tip but I am not enabling pledges on my profile because that would mean I would have to deliver on a regular basis,

I now love dropping into my Vocal Subscription to see someone who has not published in a while and has not shared their story on Facebook and by switching to the Feed you can see the latest stories and that is a brilliant go-to point for me.

This has also been enhanced with the Vocal Comments which enables me to communicate with none Facebook members, or rather people who I don’t know on Facebook.

Conclusion

I am extremely happy that Vocal is moving forward in a lot of positive ways and am learning slowly to make use of a lot of the features and I know they can be exasperating at times with various issues, but looking at the big picture we have a great content sharing platform that enables us to share our creations with the whole wide world, not just one or two people..