With Subscriptions Vocal Takes a Huge Step in the Right Direction

I first found out about Vocal through an ad for the Doomsday Diary contest. The prospect of winning $20k for a short story was enough to blow my mind, and since it only cost a buck to enter, I thought What the hell?

I figured that I'd give it a shot, write a little story about a man with a locket lodged in his intestines and how much I hate capitalist healthcare, and then deactivate my account once the results rolled in. Then they announced the Summer Fiction Series, and again I thought What the hell?

Of course, I always assumed that my time here would be short. I'd test the water, and unless things looked great, I'd bounce and cut my losses.

So Why Am I Considering Continuing to Pay for Vocal?

I took on the Summer Fiction Series as a challenge to myself: could I write 8 stories based on writing prompts this summer? I didn't expect to win any, but I thought that by forcing myself through the challenges I could learn some new skills.

Then one morning I got great news: No, I hadn't written a winning story, but for reasons that I don't fully understand, one of my stories had found some readers. I had fun writing The Diner At the End of Your Life, and I was amazed by the fact that over a dozen people had read it.

It ended up being read 18 times. Is that a huge number? No. Is it big enough that I need to worry about Vocal income in my tax returns? Not really. But it was a hell of a lot of fun because after years of writing only for a couple of friends, strangers had read my piece.

I didn't win the contest, but people found my story. Someone might have even shared it with their friends? I didn't know, but I was thrilled.

What Is Writing Really About?

Don't get me wrong: I would love a little extra cash in my pocket, and it was that staggering prize for the Doomsday Diary that drew me to Vocal in the first place. But as I interacted with the site, I realised that the fun of Vocal is knowing that strangers are reading your work.

I had all of these thoughts about Bo Burnham's Inside and I didn't know what to do with them. So I wrote my thoughts down and hit publish. 8 people I've never met before now have heard my thoughts about the special. Did they agree? Disagree? I don't know. But I was writing, and my writing was being heard.

That's fun.

But there was a problem: Imagine someone read one of my stories and loved it. Not enough to tip me, but enough that they wanted more from me. How could they communicate that? How could they engage with my work?

Having a couple of stories do well (by my humble standards) didn't help my stories as a whole. I'm pretty proud of a piece I wrote about The Mist and covid-19 but it died in the water. And when I found stories by authors that I enjoyed, I had no way to keep up with them unless I could find their online presence elsewhere. This left me googling for Samantha Panepinto's twitter account when I just wanted to follow her after reading her Doomsday Diary winning entry.

That was frustrating.

Thankfully, that might be over.

Introducing Subscribe

Writing stories and posting them blindly, hoping that they'll find an audience but having no control over that--that was thrilling at first. It reminded me of having my first blog as a teenager. But after a while, it starts to feel like you're not getting anywhere.

To be clear: Vocal isn't my life. I write Vocal stories under a penname because I just want it to be fun. Under my legal name, I'm currently photographing a series of protests in a major North American city while trying to scrape out passing grades in Summer college courses. When I log into Vocal, I'm looking to have fun reviewing movies or reading other people's stories.

And after a while, posting without progress stops being so much fun.

Watching the numbers of readers interacting with a piece rise? That's fun. Posting a heartfelt story just to see it get buried? Less fun. Even scrolling through pages of stories written by strangers... that's thrilling because there's so much potential. But sometimes you don't want thrills. Sometimes you want a list of stories from people you trust to be interesting and entertaining.

By giving the users more control over their feeds, Vocal might just have fixed that problem.

I don't know; I'm not married to the platform, and when it stops being fun, I'll stop paying for it. But I'm going to stick around because I want to see how introducing Subscribers contributes to the site. I even want to read more stories because I think it will be fun to have a curated list of authors I like. I'd rather check that than reddit when I need a break from that previously-mentioned protests that I'm photographing.

Honestly, Subscribe is such a good idea that I can't believe it wasn't here already. And if something is going to really plant Vocal as the youtube-but-for-text that we all want it to be, it will be Subscribe. Those cash prizes are flashy, but not everyone is going to get them. With Subscribe, everyone has a chance to find a few readers of their own, and that's incredible.

I can't wait to see where we're going from here.