Vocal Creator Chat: 4/18/23
A place to connect and discuss all things Vocal.
Have questions about creating stories, growing your audience, and getting rewarded on Vocal? The Vocal community and team are here to help answer your questions and feedback together.
Every Tuesday at 12 PM ET, we'll assemble the Vocal community, as well as our Creator Experience and Product teams, in a thread to respond to creator inquiries for one hour.
Please follow Vocal’s Community Guidelines and don’t spam your own profile or stories in the thread. We encourage the community to report users or comments that break these guidelines.
Some updates and reminders from the Vocal team:
- We released push notifications for the Vocal app on iOS and Android 🎉
- We launched two challenges based on prompt suggestions in the Shape the Future of Vocal Challenges thread. Shout to Cheryl E Preston and Korina Camel 🏆
Got questions about Vocal or feedback about what’s new? Leave a comment in this thread to join the Vocal Creator Chat.
Also, be sure to join our Raise Your Voice Threads every Thursday at 12PM ET to champion inspiring stories and outstanding creators on Vocal. Save it to your calendar so you don’t miss it.
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Vocal Creator Chat
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More stories from Vocal Creator Chat and writers in Vocal and other communities.
What I Would Do if I Joined Vocal Today
I'd do things a bit different if I joined Vocal today instead of February 2021. For one thing; the platform itself has changed quite a lot. Acting on input from its writer/creators many enhancements to the reporting, pay structure, engagement, and even ownership possibilities are now in place. (Yes- I am aware that not every change has been greeted with approval. This is not that: I am focusing on what I would do differently today.)
By Judey Kalchik 6 days ago in Writers
Comments (23)
so to get a place in top stories, is there some guidelines to follow,or does vocal have selected 8 or 10 members who always get spot on top story?
Nice work Very well written. thanks for informeshion
Hi Vocal! Thank you so much for giving us the chance to connect with you. I apologize I missed this thread yesterday, but I wanted to leave this here as it is something I've been thinking about for a long time: Would it be possible for you to give us the capability to pin more stories on our profiles? I would really love the ability to showcase more than 3 stories. I think allowing us to customize our profiles a bit more will help us grow our audience. 😊
Hey I have activate vocal plus and I have posted my 100th story is there any bonus for 100th story
Really love reading all the questions and ideas. This has been a great idea 🙌🏾
I would like to see more categories for poetry. Poems can especially take on story forms. You could add 'epic' as a category for poems. You could also add horror, self-reflection, sensual/erotic (I know this since one of my poems for a challenge was submitted to 'Poets' but when reviewed was published to the 'Filthy' community), and because we just had limericks, You could add humor. Due to poetry being so broad, the community itself might need a few more tabs. I put a lot of stuff into 'slam' and 'performance' poetry because of rhyme scheme and my own confidence in having performed in front of audiences before.
YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Redditt, Quora, etc. are all platforms that authors can use to drive audiences towards their profile/stories. My question is, Vocal, what are You doing to drive people towards Your platform? I understand that there's no ads on this platform, but what drives readers to the platform that want to visit more than once? I myself was driven for the creation aspect along with competitions and potential monetary gains. Yet, besides attracting creators, what do You do to grab the attention of readers?
When does vocal usually release the emails to contest winners? Like, on average in terms of hours?
I really appreciate the comment section added to our stories this past year. Is there any plan or possibility to have a comment section on a vocal accounts home page? In particular, it would allow for Thank you's for reads and tips to further engage our subscribers that are not creators.
Hi Vocal, I know the amount we get from reads is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount we get from contest winnings (and I'm so grateful to have been selected in the recent Limerick challenge! 🙏), however I did find it surprising in the winners announcements for the Limerick challenges that you include the winners' entire poems in your own write-up, thereby discouraging click-throughs and reads. As far as I've seen, this is sometimes done for haiku challenges too—Would you be willing to adopt a policy that honors the author's IP in future announcements?
I have been on Vocal for over two years now. I have noticed that the payouts for the challenges have decreased as of late. I remember $20,000, $10,000, and several $5000 challenges. I guess my question is, will we see higher value challenges again in the future or is this the new norm? Thanks.
Poetry should be positioned as a Top story of its own... Each of these categories should have between 5 Top stories selected.
Some more nonfiction challenges would be exciting. It would be nice to present real stories creators go through, to the vocal audience. Many readers can get to know us more, outside of the fictional world. And even challenges outside of the typical subjects would be interesting.
OK- I have to ask: are any of the Vocal teams members or visitors of the Facebook Vocal groups? Or is this top secret?
Oh, I have an idea. I would like to see top stories broken into two categories. Fiction and Non-Fiction. With the fiction stories staying longer. Maybe fiction is this week's top stories.
Hey guys, I was curious as to how Top Stories are selected ? Is there an algorithm involved ? The Top Story page has a tendency to look pretty similar day by day. Same profiles seem to reoccur over and over to a point where it looks like there is an algorithm at play in selection. Not to say I don't think that the more "successful" writer's deserve recognition. I just don't see as much selection on a daily basis. The Raise Your Voice thread seems to be a good effort to help parse through the large volume of material, so that's a good start. Anyway, thanks for your efforts in making the community a more interactive space for creators.
I think a fiction challenge that combines vampires, werewolves, and zombies would be fun. And not just any VamWolfbies, but ones with bad attitudes. And have no respect for the litter laws. The first line could be “A snickers warper laid by the side of the road, but no one was laughing.” Just a thought.
There has been a drive to create a group that is the male equivalent of Viva- I know of such an effort since 2021. Are we closer to having that in place? Perhaps this year re: Father's Day is the year the Stetson group becomes a reality?
Good afternoon everyone! My name is Loryne Andawey and I serve as one of the admins in the Facebook group, Vocal+Assist. We host bi-weekly prompts/challenges in our group and our most recent one is called "The Rickler." It was created by Rick Henry Christopher, the format of which consists of 12 lines/sentences (3 intro, 6 body, 3 outro). Our group has submitted three Ricklers so far and we are hoping that some of you here can join the fun! Submissions close on April 21, 2023 :) Links to the three Ricklers are below: Ashley Thompson started us off with "Call the Cavalry" https://vocal.media/poets/call-the-cavalry Followed closely by Antoinette Brey with "The Rays of Power" https://vocal.media/poets/the-rays-of-power Then my take on the Rickler with this long-winded entry https://vocal.media/fiction/on-steak-and-purple-prose Hope to see you guys here! :)
I saw that crowdfunding/preorder/kickstarter is in place for the Fiction Challenge compilation book. Is there a pub date? Will it also be available for ordering by the public?
Hello! Can you please address the minimum engagement or read time concern that many people have raised recently? I’d like to know exactly what makes a read count as a read. For example- If I open a story to see how long it is and then close it and open it to read again later does that count as a read or did the first quick opening time negate the second real read? Or, if it only takes me 4 minutes to read a “15 minute story” and I leave it open in another tab to try and get that story to the required time, does that work? I know you are trying to avoid fake reads and all but…Is there not a better way to do this so that genuine but quick readers reads still count??
I have three tickets outstanding for Vocal , last week I was asked to submit a resource suggestion and it has been completely ignored. Vocal needs to address issues not just ignore them
How important is SEO for Vocal stories? There has been conflicting opinions that Vocal content isn't readily found using search engines. I encourage folks to employ good SEO practices; does it really help?