Don't Just Publish - Keep Your Writing Safe on Vocal

Sharing what you write on Vocal is an easy and fun way to express your creativity. If you paid for a Vocal+ membership, you can enter their contests, known as “challenges.” Anyone can use the prompts in the challenges to work on their writing muscles, even if they're not entering. A supportive writing community exists on Vocal, and many Creators run their own unofficial challenges, adding to the camaraderie.

It is not optimal to rely on Vocal as your primary storage or backup solution. Vocal is a public publishing platform and not designed as a safeguard for your documents. Sure, they are stored there, but dedicated services like Google Drive or Dropbox can safeguard them.

No matter your genre—poetry, essays, fiction, or non-fiction—always create and save your documents using reliable software such as Word or Google Docs. Keep copies on your computer and regularly back them up to an external drive or secure cloud storage. After investing so much effort, don’t risk losing your work to hardware failure or website issues. 🖥️╶🔳🟢

Personally, I write my stories in Word before transferring them to Vocal. After pasting the text, I make any necessary formatting adjustments, since features like italics and bold don’t always transfer. On the occasions I wrote directly on Vocal, I encountered problems—sometimes entire paragraphs vanished during editing. By keeping an offline copy, you can easily restore lost content. If your browser crashes or the Vocal site becomes unstable, your work remains safe. Writing offline also provides better editing tools, such as spell-check and grammar suggestions. Using a simple plain-text editor can help minimize formatting issues prior to moving your work online.

Even large, well-known companies can disappear or have their business models restructured — think of Montgomery Ward (now only online instead of brick-and-mortar), K-Mart, or Sears (most stores closed, and both are barely visible now). If you don’t keep personal backups of your work and Vocal ever shuts down, you risk losing all your writing.

Finally, always remember to SAVE your work frequently as you write or edit in Vocal. Save often, review your draft for errors—especially if you use voice-to-text—and make necessary corrections before publishing.

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Copyright © 3/2/2026 by Andrea O. Corwin

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