Pacing Ourselves

Introduction

The music is "Perspective" by Peter Gabriel because this is my perspective on Vocal Publishing

People have told me that I write too much and when I publish in the Vocal groups and on Vocal they therefore shy away from my work. Because of the number of Stories that I publish, I seriously would not expect anyone to read all my work. I have said it's almost like a newspaper column or fanzine.

Now that Vocal publishing is damned near-instantaneous and the editor can be used as an editor (almost) I never publish one thing after another on Vocal, but sometimes in the Facebook groups, I publish consecutively if there are a few hours between stories and no one else has published in the group.

I recently had twelve stories earmarked for resourcing, which I could have published one after another, but seeing stories published one after another by the same author makes me think of either AI-generated or Plagiarised content.

So What Do I Do?

I generally write when I feel like writing or that I have something to say and want to share it with my Vocal audience, like this piece that you are reading now. If my pieces are too close together I try and wait a few hours before publication. My last story is a day old so I know I am not flooding anyone's notifications.

There have been times when people I subscribe to have filled my notifications with their publications. For me, that is an immediate unsubscribe. It's not like when a TV series drops all the episodes to stream, this destroys my notifications feed although Vocal doesn't give a damn about it. The only answer at the moment is to subscribe to nobody and that is hardly bringing creators together, is it?

I also see Creators flooding Facebook groups with one Vocal story after another. The thing is my brain sees that as spamming, maybe that is just me, but if I see myself posting two consecutive stories in a Facebook group I feel like a spammer. Though I seem to be the only poet who posts here, although Judey Kalchik does as well. So would love to see more people posting there, just to make me feel I am not alone.

This is not meant to be critical but advisory. If you see ten cakes on a display, you only take one (well I do), because I could not take all ten.

So when I see ten Vocal stories by the same author I will only read something that catches my eye, but the fact it is flooding my options may mean I don't read any.

Vocal also annoys me because for publications I use my Subscription Feed because it is so much easier to pick and choose my reading, and it doesn't affect my new subscribers, likes, and comments notifications. In my opinion, publications should not be in notifications at all. This is my subscription feed and I think this is far better to pick and choose what I want to read than the notifications.

Vocal said that would give creators the ability to choose their notifications but that went straight in the bin (though Vocal called it a road map).

Conclusion

I believe if you do not flood your audience with publications then you are likely to get more interactions, responses and reciprocal reads to your publications.

Sometimes I feel that I am being ignored but the reality is that I get a lot of reads where I am unaware of the readers. We all want to be noticed and we try our best to be noticed but I believe it is good to pace your publications for the benefit of your audience.

Now I am going to publish this and hope that I don't annoy anyone or lose any subscribers.