Tips On Formatting Your Vocal Stories

Introduction

NOTE: This is about the old Vocal Editor. These are my observations on the new Vocal Editor, although there is some common ground:

I see some posts on Vocal, and often they are just a block of text or sometimes have links posted in them that don’t actually link. This is often part of the learning curve with the Vocal editor.

I almost always write my pieces, like this, in Google Docs, and then when I am ready, I paste the content into Vocal Editor to finalise my article before posting.

I do get questions from people about how to do this and that in Vocal, and some I can answer and some I can’t.

The tips here are based on working on a Windows computer. They might work on other operating systems, but different operating systems may, obviously, operate differently.

How I Put My Stories Together

I usually create an image using Night Cafe for my story when I have the idea in my head, this is so that I do not infringe copyright but you can download free images for Unsplash (the Vocal default) or Pixabay and all my images are free to download there for the cost of a credit.

To do that link I used the embed button that appears when you do a new like, see below, and gives you the option to upload a file, embed a link or add an Unsplash image.

Often striking images do pull people into Vocal stories, a lot have grabbed my attention and drawn me into stories and introduced me to some great authors.

I almost always start with an introductory paragraph and then title it and use the Vocal Formatting Bar to turn the title into a paragraph header. This apparently gets the attention of search engines.

If possible, I also include images or links to make the piece more readable. As I have stated many times before, I am fairly laconic (although people who chat with me may dispute that), but I like to pack as much information into as little text as possible.

A recent excellent improvement to the editor (as of early 2025) is that on a Windows Computer, you can use the right click of a mouse to copy an image, then Ctrl-V to paste it into your Vocal story like the one below:

Also, we can now change the title of our stories, but the title is used for the URL, and if you change the title, any previous links will no longer work:

The URL for this is

https://vocal.media/stories/tips-on-formatting-your-vocal-stories

So if that changes, then you need to go back and update previous links where you have shared it.

My pieces are usually short and based on things that exist, which I find makes writing easier. I really admire fiction writers and poets because they can produce magic out of nothing.

But essentially, this is the bare bones of my creative process, though here is a video I did last year that may explain a little more.

The Vocal Formatting Bar

You can see that I have used this in this post. It appears when you select a piece of text.

The first four characters you select with your mouse pointer to turn the text Bold , Italic . Strikethrough , and Underline. You can then use the Stop circle to select and remove any formatting.

Next up is the quoted text icon which I use to format poetry and text quoted from another source. I have used it on this paragraph so you can see the effect.

Next is the Header icon, but you can only remove this by selecting your Header text and using it a second time. I used it on the title of this paragraph.

Next up is the web link icon and this allows you to create a readable link rather than a raw URL (Uniform Resource Locator, colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network) , like Mike Singleton Bestselling Author On Amazon

The actual URL is https://amzn.to/3V25KZK, which would you rather see?

Most Vocal stories require a six hundred word minimum but if you move your mouse over the word count you can see all the story types that have a zero-word limit.

A Brief Conclusion

I often add a piece of music from YouTube at the start of the piece so that people can have something to listen to while they read my story. For this, I've included "Making Time" by The Creation because we are all making time to create.