Still Crawling And On Top

Introduction

I covered this about two weeks back but I am surprised that without any Top Stories on Vocal, the reads of my Vocal stories are still rising significantly. Not only that my subscribers are rising too.

I normally expect forty or fifty reads a day but now that is around seventy or eighty (today I hit ninety, so my sixty thousand reads may be hit sooner than I expected).

This was the last post on this subject but I am going to share a few more observations on the situation with you and hopefully, you can take some advice to boost your own read count.

The music I have included is The Beat's "Twist and Crawl"

I do get a lot of people asking me to read and subscribe, but I only do that if someone has something I want to read, and I subscribe if the creator interests me and/or they comment on my work. Unfortunately, I seldom see who subscribes to me. So if I don't read or subscribe it's just that I've not seen anything that interests me ... yet.

Also, the image I created used the prompt

"Dragon on top of Blackpool Tower with a book"

It didn't quite work out but I loved the dragon's expression

Observations

First of all that was a long introduction for me, but you know that because you have got this far.

One of the problems with stories on Vocal is that people tend to concentrate on what is current so as new stories are published older stories tend to be forgotten, and sometimes they do deserve to be read a lot more than they are.

Top Stories and Challenge placements give a little more traction but even challenges are eventually forgotten by most readers, or maybe they don't know that they exist.

Two years ago I wrote this piece about the first Vocal Challenge:

I found this really difficult to track down, but Vocal's Search facility is excellent for tracking down stories using mentions within the text.

In the end, Vocal Stories are like Instagram, Facebook and any Social Media post, as time passes they sink and are forgotten. I think I am one of the few people who looks through old Vocal stories to find something interesting.

I use the search facility to make sure I haven't covered a story before, and no one else has published something similar. I do find it a bit awkward if I write something and someone else has done virtually the same thing, it makes me feel like a plagiarist when I know I am not.

In the Vocal Social Society, we promote stories on threads for members and non-members which means they stay visible for a long time.

Most of my reads come from non-Vocal members so I don't get many hearts or comments but I get them because I find places to to share my stories elsewhere that are relevant. My most read story was in a Facebook Folk Group but caused a lot of controversy there. Some Folk Music Fans can be very intolerant:

Conclusion

Nine of my top most-read stories have over three hundred reads, onlt two of them made Top Stories although one of those is now a Crawler (the one below) and has just joined my three hundred club.

Thank you for reading, I really appreciate your support.