TELL Tales

I have always had a passion to tell stories. Story telling is the heart of our culture. Plato told us

Those who tell the stories rule society

I have always loved to sit listening to someone tell a tale. There is a power the storyteller holds over his audience.

The first true Olympian born of the Titan Cronus was Hestia. She was the goddess of the home but most importantly the hearth; the fire at the centre of the home where we gathered at the end of the day. The hearth, before all of everything we now have, was the centre of the universe; the place to tell your stories. It was the interaction with our immediate community. Hestia is overlooked in the telling of the Greek myths but as the protector of the hearth in her way was the most powerful of them all.

My own storytelling used to be reserved to telling stories when socialising and drinking with friends. I remember my father telling me

never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

I learnt to tell stories by being raised by storytellers.

With recent circumstances I found the ability to share and tell my stories had vanished. So last October I wrote my first story. Writing stories is a different proposition to telling them. I am still learning and only half a year into my journey. Here is the first story I ever wrote. It needs a polish but I am going to leave it as it is, as it is also a footnote to the start of my current journey.

Since then I have written over thirty stories, I have a mild dyslexia and I am having to relearn grammar and tenses. I am also slowly picking up a small but supportive following and through that some amount of credit and feedback. Last January, I started looking for somewhere to write and share my short stories; a platform to develop and improve through. I found Vocal. The truth is every platform where you can share your fiction has problems. There is no perfect solution. Vocal is clean, polished and has a nice format to present your craft.

The biggest criticism I hear about Vocal is no one reads your stuff. The truth is Vocal is a publisher not a marketer. It is a tool and it is all about how you use that tool to suit your purposes. Month by month I have used Vocal my way and slowly expanded my reach and increased my number of reads. I do have to agree that despite aggressive marketing Vocal did have a very real problem with ‘Short Fiction’. Then they launched their new community 'Fiction'.

Vocal is not shy in coming forward. It gained a huge amount of signups with its ‘Little Black Book’ Challenge. It initially failed in looking after that new group. Vocal with this new community now has a sub platform for this very important genre of writing. Before this it very rarely selected Short Fiction for a top story status, especially independent pieces not relating to a current challenge. This new community gives me hope that Vocal is moving in the right direction. I would still like to see further progress. The ability to separate the stories in your portfolio into two categories, fiction and nonfiction would be a massive advantage. That simple fix alone would make self-marketing your own Short Fiction so much easier.

Vocal is not entirely to blame. David Miller in the introduction to his book ‘That Glimpse of Truth’ states

…a short story can do pretty much anything – tell the tale, untell the tale told, hide the teller; make you laugh, make you cry, and so on and so forth – as can any novel but, as a short story is already a distillation, it gives the writer a far harder task to achieve everything, not just any thing.

This art form is not easily categorised. It does not follow the rules of algorithms or SEO content. It is a subjective mine field. Good storytelling spreads by word of mouth. You hear a story, repeat it, that listener repeats it and so on and so on. Repetition and recommendation is the greatest advertising you can ever have.

One day soon the right platform will provide service to this art form in the right way. That platform will corner the market and explode a new form of publishing into the world. Vocal is in the right position to do this, the new community as a sub platform is a positive launch pad in this direction. This platform still needs some help. That help is potentially ‘TELL Tales’.

Now ‘TELL Tales’ is a concept. It currently does not exist. I am just a simple sheep farmer in Normandy France, isolated by lockdown waiting for the next one to arrive. This whole article is just a way to protect this as my intellectual property.

The name is derived from the word telltale.

Dictionary definition of telltale...

telltale [ˈtɛlteɪl]

ADJECTIVE revealing, indicating, or betraying something.

"the telltale bulge of a concealed weapon"

synonyms: revealing · revelatory · suggestive · meaningful · significant · meaning · indicative · unmistakable · giveaway

It also works as an instruction or command that Hestia would be proud of. This is the power the brand name holds.

Yesterday afternoon, I delved into Vocal looking for some short fiction to read I found these

This was written by Rachel Robbins a talented story teller from the North of England.

This was written by Emma Stacey. She does not have a bio. I believe she might be from Australia but she is very active on a Facebook Vocal group helping to promote and encourage writers for Vocal.

This was written by Paula Shablo, who has 73 published stories on Vocal. She has an incredible sense for the magic of the short story.

Three very talented writers, who are pretty dedicated to short fiction, very different in their own individual way. Also pretty dedicated to writing for Vocal. Yet I don’t think they have a single top story between them. These stories were not the easiest to find. None of these stories were written for the cash rewards of a challenge. They exist because the authors understand the value in telling a tale.

But no credit to any of them. Come on, Vocal you need to do better. Lets keep moving in this right direction and mine this phenomenal resource you have.

I was initially looking for a short story written by a friend of mine. Only to find he had removed it from Vocal and published it on Medium because he found it a better fit. That for me is frustrating because for potential and format I think Vocal is superior, also now with a potential new focus on short fiction the future looks brighter.

The simple truth is my friend knew he would get more reads on the other platform. Both platforms have exactly the same problem. They are both platforms for writers. Writers primarily want their stuff to be read. You only have to join one Facebook writing group to be inundated with shares. Or the impossible exchange of a read for a read. Or feedback for feedback.

The strength of ‘TELL Tales’ is that it is a platform for readers utilising platforms for writers. It is one possible solution for many Short Fiction publishing platforms out there. Not just Vocal.

So What is TELL Tales?

TELL Tales is a subscription service which sends its subscribers a handpicked short story every day.

The story is between 1000 and 3000 words. So will take between five and ten minutes to read.

The story will be sent as a link to a publishing site. So in the case of Vocal, content would be covered by the payment of reads to the author, costing TELL Tales no money for providing content.

TELL Tales would send the link at a requested time for the subscriber. So it could be sent to be read over breakfast, in a lunch break, for that long commute home, or even to be read in bed before you go to sleep.

Another tool TELL Tales would like to exploit is a word of mouth feature. An ability to recommend. We would not encourage writer's self promotion within the platform but we would encourage readers to tell us their favourite stories. This would bring more readers to the publishing platform we were promoting; and a credit system would be awarded to successful recommendations. We would empower readers. There ID would tell everyone that they had discerning taste and their favourite reading list should be acknowledged. Let's not just reward creators, lets reward consumers. The heart of TELL Tales is connecting reader to writer. Lets reward both.

This entire stage of the offer by TELL Tales would be provided for free.

So where is the money?

The first level of TELL Tales is free. It should also always be free of cost and advertisements. It should be clean and stand apart because of that. It should be marketed as a place to share and interact with stories that have been selected to entertain and make you question, challenge and think. There is no faster way to share a product than to have the reader sharing what they have just read with their immediate neighbour.

That intimacy of sharing the story will bring more people to TELL Tales.

Early options for monetising TELL Tales would be for a monthly fee of $1 you could bookmark and save your most important stories to be reread at a later time. We would also give access to the archive of stories. The archive would be cross-referenced with 50 unique tags making it easier to navigate the larger it gets and find your preferences.

TELL Tales has the potential to bridge a multitude of platforms. If a platform wanted TELL Tales to exclusively use their platform and fulfilled the required criteria TELL Tales needed, to protect their brand they could pay for exclusivity for a required period of time.

The real monetisation of TELL Tales happens after an initial launch period when we offer a specialised offer.

The Next Chapter

When a certain time period or membership criteria is reached these secondary offers should be offered. All for the monthly subscription of $1. For that criteria you would receive seven short stories a week of your chosen genre. Now the archive can grow exponentially. Six initial offers should be created so the original free platform can share one from each offer and one from the archive each week. Further offers can be created at any stage as the product grows. There could easily be offers like TELL Tales History, TELL Tales Retro, TELL Tales Westerns.

Further Expansion could go into TELL Tales Audio, TELL Tales Animation, TELL Tales Film.

The Big Income

At an estimate of two years down the line and streamlining all the kinks in a multiple offer, a sister site would be created called TELL Tales Storytime. This would be targeted at bedtime reading for children. An experience for care givers to share with their children. This would be a complicated proposition and would have to level reading appropriately, engage more images and not be just sourced and curated but also possibly developed to a degree in house. It would require more images, stronger content and would have to be internally regulated to maintain a trusted consistency. The archive on this platform and listing favourites would be key. It would effectively be a library in your hand from the start. A free offer would be still be vital to its makeup. It would however be a completely separate entity and would herald in the funding and potential to launch an entire Mk 2 offer of the whole concept.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Potential to work across multiple platforms

No reliability on a single publishing platform.

Economically the initial set up is small in comparison to similar offers.

It has versatility and adaptability in the offers structure.

Content is funded by the publisher not the TELL Tale platform.

Weaknesses

In a very early stage of development

Important pieces still need to be designed and sourced.

Initial funding still needs to be secured

Opportunities

The initial offer has a multitude of expansion possibilities

There is a definite gap in the market for this product

Publishing platforms need to source readers so there is a large opportunity to work in partnership and in mentorship with these products.

A different prospect to current publishing.

Threats

The race to market – I just want to elaborate on this point, by exposing the details of the concept here it is potentially possible for the concept to be intellectually stolen. I have withheld a number of key elements to the offer. This should ensure that if a counter offer was launched ahead of TELL Tales these withheld elements should enable a rebalancing of the scales rapidly. I have shared an extremely unique and ingenious marketing proposition for the whole offer with only the smallest group of people. Each person was open mouthed by how extraordinary and strong the potential was within the strategy. Rivals can beat me to market, it will be good for the entire community. I have no doubt with the launch of TELL Tales, within two years we will be the platform that everybody is talking about.

This whole article is a pitch for the Membership Challenge on Vocal, potentially producing the seed money for the initial offer for TELL Tales. I currently own a large property in France which I have placed on the market to fund the initial offering of TELL Tales. The success of this offer is not reliant on the success of this pitch. The opportunity here just helps speed up the timeframe and bringing in the possibility of an early partnership.

I am passionate about short fiction and finding a place and a home for it at everybody’s fingertips. For too long people trying to succeed and monetise this art form have been at the bequest of difficult publishing houses, vanity presses and unscrupulous anthologies. This offers an alternative a second way.

I am also passionate about telling stories and sharing stories. TELL Tales although it would be screen based, offers the opportunity to break up car journeys, start conversations and offer questions that can be sought internally and externally in the real world.

V.S. Pritchett said the short story was

…something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing

A new form of literature, delivered in a new way has the potential to ignite a fire. Spark the intellect. TELL Tales is most definitely an intriguing proposition.

Thank you for reading my entry into the ‘Member Only’ Membership challenge.

Now is the hard part if you believe in the potential of this offer and its need to arrive sooner rather than later. I need you to share this article, heart it, tip it. Give feedback on the post wherever you found it. Do anything you can to light it up. It needs to flare up on all the analysis data the judges would be using to see that this is the proposition they should be considering.

I have more content here so feel free to have a look, maybe even let me tell you a more conventional tale.

Enjoy and have an awesome day.