Vocal - the #100 thoughts

...And so I have published 100 posts on the Vocal platform. Time to reflect a bit.

I had high hopes for Vocal when I joined - some of these hopes materialized, while the rest proved to be overly optimistic. I know that rhyming metered poetry (most of my posts) is not popular these days. I had many discussions on this subject with other poes, reareds, and even some random folks who were careless enough to be within the "excuse me, may I ask you a quick question" range. The results were inconclusive to slightly negative, but I did, do and will maintain that poems should rhyme. And prose should have rich imagery, rhythm and structure - while still being called prose.

The advent of ChatGPT will probably cause some shifts in the creative writing landscape - I am guilty of spending way too much time playing with this wonderful toy, but IMHO it is not really "writing". But I digress.

To date, I averaged 5 reads per post - just a couple below 500 total. I don't know what the Vocal average is, so it is hard to say if this result is great or poor (althought to me 5 seems very low). Of course, the reads were not uniformly distributed. About half the reads came from 15 posts, and the three Tops were responsible for 138 of the reads.

I have not (yet) won any contests, which probably indicates that I am not as good as I think. Interestingly, of the three Tops I got I only thought one to be special (different?) enough. So, I don't understand the Vocal editorial process and criteria, and I don't understand my readers' interests. How to get better at it I have no idea. Is the reader (editor) always right, or is creative writing an activity that just has to rely on some sort of self-gratification? I don't know. I sometimes tried to follow the line of writing that sseemed to be popular - with very limited success. Again, the reader is probably always right. That said, my readers proved to be a bit inconsistent.

Ther is some correlation between the number of reads and the number of likes, of course - but there are some well-liked but poorly-read posts, and there are some that were read a lot but did not get many likes. The former had clearly found their (limited) audience, while the latter failed to touch whatever strings creative writing is supposed to touch.

Ther were some interesting aberrations: out of 17 people who read The End of the World only one liked it. Puzzlingly, there were some posts that got likes with no reads (War, What We Are, New Year is Here and Morning Web) - which kinda raises the question about the validity of such likes. Or at least their justifyability, if there is such a word.

Some posts show very said zeroes (To All the Ones and another To All The Ones, You II, No Time for Dragons and Smaller.) While I long since gave up on trying to understand "the wisdom of the crowd", at least the last one seems to me to be undeservingly unpopular.

What does it all mean? I am either not as good at writing as I thought, or the world is not ready. Also, I suck big time at promotion, and even my three Tops were not able to compensate for that. I either need to do something about it - or just admit that Vocal is not the right platform for me and go back to more tratitional publishing arrangements.

Oh, and I am extremely grateful to my 32 subscribers! Thank you for your support!