Vocal By the Numbers

I am writing this on the first Vocal anniversary. I am writing this in the same vein as my other advice articles. Not because I am an expert on any of the technical skills that one could think of that would apply here. Rather, I am an amateur with a gift for trying harder. Or at times, willing to stick around long enough to see what happens. And seeing what happens, or rather, what was happening is what led me to start tracking my stats.

When I started using Vocal a year ago, I had not considered my stats. Honestly, I didn’t understand how to use them, or how to increase my reads. I think this is a common problem amongst online writers. It is often why writers get disheartened when using online publishing platforms.

This is not a fault of these publishing sites, rather it is an unfortunate reality of the industry. Being a writer is very analogous to being a musician, in the sense that it would be wonderful to have an agent approach us, and make all of our dreams come true after one performance. But the reality is that is unlikely to ever happen.

Careers in creative works are built on work, hard work. Work that takes time figuring out what does, does not work. Some people give up on their dreams due to this reality. Others settle for a consistent paycheck, writing for magazines, newspapers, or working as a technical writer. I know this because I've been in this situation.

After I wrote my first book, I sent it off to every publisher I could, thinking I had bottled sunshine. Fortunately, hindsight is always clearest. I can now admit that my first book was terrible. I was trying too hard. I was too calculated in my approach, and in some ways doing it for the wrong reasons. And I carried this wrong attitude into my first few Vocal projects.

When I started on Vocal, I did what most do. I wrote something that I thought would win the first challenge I entered. I continued in this mindset until I wrote, “Who Created Princess Leia’s Aesthetic?” And that was where I turned my mindset around. I saw for the first time that I could make money on Vocal in a way that didn’t rely on a challenge. I still haven’t made as much as I hoped, but I have increased my reads and earnings each month since I began tracking them.

I began tracking my stats in mid-October 2021, thus the imperfect numbers before then. But once I did, I started noticing some important things going on.

First, there seems to be a maximum length for certain pieces. This maximum is how long you can keep a reader engaged long enough for a read to count. Now, this does depend on the piece’s subject matter. I have quite a few poems on Vocal, and one of those is very long compared to the majority of poems out there. I also have a piece that I titled "Two Short Poems" because both poems were too short to publish on their own. Looking at the chart below, it is easy to see that "Two Short Poems" has about twice as many reads as "Nacirema." Luckily, though, both share about the same rate of likes to reads.

Why would I track likes to reads?

The reasoning for this is simple. I wanted a way to gauge the reception of a story. As mentioned in a previous article, Vocal doesn’t currently have a system for non-members to like a story. So, I hoped that this would at least be somewhat helpful information to know how well an article might do. It has had mixed results, as I can’t know how well a non-member liked a story. Although I am not currently tracking the stats in the same way, I do use the stats features on Instagram and Twitter for that. In particular, I am always excited when I see someone save an article on Instagram, as it lets me know it made a significant impact.

Tracking the raw numbers on both of these lets me calculate the percentage of how well a story is "liked." While I don’t write to get a story that has a particular number of "reads" or a certain "likes" percentage, it does let me know how I am improving both my writing and the promotion of my work. I will continue to write things that I am interested in writing, as I write for my satisfaction.

My other major area of focus is tracking my reads per month. This has allowed me to see a few things. It has shown how my audience has grown over the last few months. But it has also shown, in the case of November, what happens when I lose the ability to stay engaged. When looking at my chart for the last year, there is a noticeable change from March 2021, when I started and was promoting my first piece as much as possible. Then from April to June when I didn’t engage at all with Vocal, there is a very large gap where I had no reads. Then around the fall I came back and started writing more and joined the various Vocal groups on Facebook. This was when my reads started picking up. But I still had not figured out how to attract more readers, in particular, readers from outside of the Vocal community.

That’s when I started playing with various promotion techniques. I created a Twitter account for my writing. And this helped with growing my outside audience. My next experiment was to write an entertainment article. I wrote this both because I could not find an article on the subject, but also because I love the movie it’s about. I did not expect this article to be selected as a Top Story. However, what I learned from this was how much getting an article selected for that can help with its reads. And with these tools, my audience began to grow. However, in October my day job forced me to shelve a lot of projects. This taught me my next lesson.

That lesson was non-content engagement. I didn’t get to start trying this until December, as I was writing a lot in November to catch up on projects. But in December, I started posting non-Vocal content I hoped would attract people to my accounts. While this didn’t bear fruit immediately, I did start to see positive results in January. This has helped me increase my reads per day month over month for the last three months(projected to be four, but ask me at the end of March).

So, what is my takeaway from doing this? I learned that getting a lot of reads in one month can be great. It can make you feel good. However, getting 300 reads one month, then dropping to 180 doesn’t feel so great. So, now rather than focusing on how many reads I get, or how much I make per month, I focus on growth across the board. Whether that growth is readers, income, subscribers, or any other metric.

I now treat my stats like flying a plane. I want to have a good, sustainable growth model. I don’t want to climb so steeply that I stall out because I lose momentum. And I don’t want to stay in the same mode of things, to where I gain no momentum, never taking off.

While what I have done may not appeal to everyone, I hope that it helps in some way. But no matter where you’re at in your writing journey, remember no what happens, you’re in control. So, continue to fly the plane, and you’ll get to where you want to go.

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