A Writer's Lightbulb Moment

This morning I chanced upon one or two little cheats whilst writing a short story called 'Skating On Thin Ice.' And I feel it is incumbent upon me to share what I discovered with all of our writers here on Medium and Vocal Media. What I came across will help me to be more productive, as well as save me time and pulling my hair out with recalcitrant computer systems.

As well as writing on Medium, I am also posting my stories on Vocal Media. This is a simple process of copying and pasting my story from Medium over to Vocal Media. One problem with that is that you can only copy over text, not photos. 

However, one big advantage of writing on Vocal Media is that Grammarly automatically highlights all of your errors. So, what I started to do was copy over the text, correct all the errors and then copy it back to Medium. Of course, you will have to delete the original text on Medium first.

Another problem that cropped up on Medium was that my hyperlink photo captions, for whatever reason, only copied the text, not the hyperlink part of the text. So I thought, great, I will have to re-copy the hyperlink captions all over again. I'll do it later. I'll go back and finish on Vocal Media first.

There I could put the photos in the story, cross referencing with the raw copy of the story on Medium. Vocal Media has the added advantage of being connected to Unsplash and automatically puts in the full hyperlink captions when you choose the photo you want to use.

Then, I decided to see if I could copy not just the Grammarly-corrected text from Vocal Media, but also the photos with the hyperlink captions intact. The answer is, yes. Problem solved.

So, I inadvertently discovered a great way to work around the Medium lack of a connection to Unsplash, including hyperlink captions. And of course, I have the added benefit of Grammarly to correct my text on Vocal Media.

So why do I not just write on Vocal Media from the start and then copy the whole thing over to Medium? Good question. The reason is that Medium's speed for scrolling, and getting around the story for editing purposes feels much smoother and much faster than Vocal Media.

So, Medium for ease and speed of writing and editing, Vocal Media for ease of text correction and photo selection, complete with hyperlink caption, and for copying over to Medium. 

If you can tolerate the downside of the Vocal Media Editor, a slight lack of speed and smoothness, then that is where you should start your story. Then when you are finished simply copy and paste the story over to Medium.

One more thing to be aware of on Vocal Media; once your story is published you can go back and do a quick edit, but you cannot edit the headline, the subheading or change your main photo. And, it is not easy to delete a story for whatever reason. To delete a story you have to email them, giving the URL link, and then wait for them to kick it back to you in submissions.

Finally, I have to say that up to now I earned a great deal more on Medium, almost three thousand dollars. On Vocal Media I have only 82 dollars in my wallet. However, Vocal Media is good for extra exposure and they do have some great challenges with big money prizes to be won. So I believe it is more than worth your while to write on both platforms.

I hope these little cheats help writers to save time and frustration, trying to work around the failings of both Medium and Vocal Media. If you are not sure of anything I have written here, please do tell me.