I Want You To Keep Us!

Hiya, Vocal.

I’ve been thinking. And though it hasn’t been a long think-session, I believe I’ve stumbled upon a suggestion that might serve a certain kind of Creator who may have given up on the platform as their launch pad.

You know how you added “exclusive stories,” pieces reserved only for paid subscribers and hidden from the rest? Imagine that basic premise but for challenges instead.

Let me paint you a picture of the near future.

A Creator—let’s call her Sally—wants to publish an entry for the “Leave the Lights on” challenge. However, she worries that because she’s spent more than ten hours perfecting it, if it doesn’t win, she can’t submit it anywhere else because it’s already online.

Now if you know anything about the greater publishing world, you know how hard it is to find one that accepts previously published pieces. Some specifically say “third party websites and personal blogs” as places your story or poem cannot have been posted.

But back to Sally.

She decides not to pay for Vocal Plus, forgoes the challenge, and instead finds a contest on Rattle instead. Now, there's no guarantee she’ll win the latter, but at least if she fails, she can still submit it somewhere else.

In an alternate reality, Sally decides to submit first-draft level stories and poems to the challenges so that she isn’t as devastated by losing, but she quickly loses joy in this process and quits Vocal entirely. Plus, she never did get any higher than a runner-up and feels like it was a handout. (If this is relatable to anyone reading, Sally waves "hello." She sees you.)

BOTH THINGS SUCK.

Here’s my solution.

Establish a wall of some kind that blocks everyone from reading the story except those who judge the challenges. Hell, make it optional. No one would be forced to hide their work unless they exclusively want to be considered for the challenge and treat it like any other publishing submission or contest.

Of course, I have no idea what the ideal way to do this is. Perhaps it’s as simple as mimicking the exclusive story model but opening it up to challenges (sans subscription fee). Or maybe you’d need to create a separate submission page for challenge-only stories, and make “community stories” a different category altogether. (Maybe you could start a Submittable page.) Or perhaps during the submission process, a Creator can select the challenge they're submitting to but deselect “community story” so that it doesn’t go public but can still be judged. (Are all of these basically the same? Probably not to a coder, but hey, that’s not my area of expertise, lol).

But what would happen if one of these stories should win or place in the challenges? Well, that’s when the story would become a “community story,” open for comments, and visible to anyone online. I personally would opt for the simplest way of, in essence, hiding the challenge entries until they place, and then making them public when they do. This can be entirely up to the author, but I feel it’s a right we all, as aspiring published writers, deserve to have.

Considering how accommodating Vocal has been to give unpaid Creators the ability to edit, retitle, and delete stories, and in opening up the winners circle to honorable mentions in addition to runner-ups, I feel that this request is not unreasonable. In fact, I believe it could have resulted in retaining a lot of writers who have since left the platform because of this flaw in Vocal's system. And doesn’t that just suck in the business world?

I’m just sad that it took me this long to think of this suggestion, lol.

Sincerely,

Your ghostly Creator who would have said this in the VCC (r.i.p.) and would totally stay on Vocal Plus if the above request was granted,

Mackenzie Davis