I Published a Story on Vocal Media, and This is What Happened

I tried a Medium alternative for a fiction story I wrote — how’d it go?

TL;DR: Nothing happened. Not one person read my story.

I published a fictional short story on Vocal Media, and if you’re reading this post to find out how many people read it, you can stop reading now. Nobody read it, and I didn’t have a very good time. But if you’d like to hear more about why I tried publishing on Vocal and the experience, read on.

Though there’s room for improvement, I’m pretty happy publishing content on Medium. Recently, however, I realized I had a piece of content that didn’t seem like a good fit for Medium (or, more accurately, for my personal Medium profile), so I decided to experiment with an alternative: Vocal Media.

What is Vocal?

Vocal Media is a site similar to Medium, where anybody can sign up to write content. Also, like Medium, authors are paid when users read their content. The site is free to readers and authors but does offer a $10/month membership called Vocal+, which includes some added benefits.

Unlike Medium, the premium membership benefits writers instead of readers, such as increased earnings. On the one hand, an opportunity for increased earnings sounds great — but on the other hand… wait a second, isn’t that a bit of a conflict of interests? A pay-to-play kind of thing? I’m not sure how I feel about it overall.

Compared to Medium, Vocal features more of a curated experience for readers. Stories are published into specific categories which readers can explore. This is sort of like Medium publications, but they’re maintained by Vocal instead of 3rd party editors, and there seems to be a much larger emphasis on the curation piece.

Why publish on Vocal?

So why did I decide to post on Vocal if I’m happy with writing on Medium? There are a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that I had a piece of unused content that wasn’t a good fit for Medium. It was an old unpublished, fictional short story just sitting around doing nothing. I figured it wasn’t doing me any good just sitting around on my computer, so why not put it out there?

The second reason is that it was an experiment: I’m always interested in trying out new sites and formats, so I figured publishing an old story would be a simple way to learn about the potential of a new publishing channel. Sometimes new ideas work, but often they don’t, and the only way to find out is to try.

Finally, though I love Medium, some things about Vocal seem interesting. For one, Vocal’s heavy curation approach seemed like it would provide opportunities for content to stand out (but it may have been my downfall — more on that below). Another thing I appreciate is that there’s far more transparency on earnings on Vocal — writers get paid a fixed amount per 1,000 views. That predictability is helpful — assuming you can get people to view your story!

What was the experience of publishing on Vocal?

There were some red flags.

Signing up for Vocal was simple enough, and as a Medium author, the site and tooling will be familiar. There’s an editor, stats & settings pages, etc. I imported my story and formatted it for Vocal with relatively little trouble. When I hit publish, I had to choose a category. Simple enough, I chose “Fiction.”

What happened after I hit publish, however, was different from Medium — instead of my story getting published right away, it went into a review status and sat there for a while. And sat there. And sat there.

And then, after two days of sitting in review: my story disappeared. At this point, I contacted Vocal support, who told me that this was a known bug and that the story wasn’t gone — I should sit tight, and it would be resolved shortly. It wasn’t decided, so I did the whole thing again, reformatting the story for Vocal and resubmitting.

This time, after a day or two, my story was published. Hooray! Now time to wait and see what happens — how many views could I get tossing a story out there on Vocal? I checked the next morning and found… 0 views. I waited another day and checked: 0 views. And again, and again: 0 views. After three weeks, I’m comfortable saying I know the results of my little experiment: 0 views.

What was I expecting?

Honestly, I was not expecting much — this was an experiment with an old piece of fiction I’d written. What I was hoping for, at least, was that Vocal’s curation, however it works, would at least put the story in front of a couple of users. Then I’d be able to look at views, reads, likes, and subscribers to get an idea of how the content funnel works on Vocal. But instead, I got nothing.

Maybe my Vocal content just sucked; maybe the headline was not even good enough to entice a single user to click, but it’s a bit discouraging. When performing this kind of experiment, there needs to be some feedback mechanism so you can figure out what to try next. When the result is nothing at all, it can be challenging and discouraging.

Though I don’t know the exact details of how Medium’s algorithms work, it seems they do a better job of surfacing new content, even from users without followers who aren’t writing in publications. I regularly discover interesting stories from people and publications I’m not following. Somehow when I published my first article on Medium, I got some initial views that pushed me past the zero-to-one problem.

Again, it’s possible my content just really sucked, but on the other hand, I’m not alone. Many reviews and write-ups call out this issue on Vocal, even popular writers who bring a ton of content to the platform.

Though I didn’t have high expectations, the lack of even a single view of the story was surprising to me.

Okay, what was the story?

I put this way down at the bottom of the post because, truly, honestly, I am not writing this post to promote my story on Vocal.

It’s a fiction story I wrote many years ago, just sitting on my hard-drive unread. I don’t even think the story is that good — but surely it’s not doing anything useful by sitting on my computer unpublished.

So, in case you’re curious, here’s the story I wrote on Vocal — it’s a work of fiction and not the kind of content I usually write, but hopefully, somebody out there will enjoy it just a bit.

So would I do it all again?

As I mentioned earlier, my foray into Vocal Media was just an experiment, and the results are in: it didn’t work. I’m certainly open to trying the platform again someday, but it was not a great first-time author experience.

Jonathan has over 20 years of engineering leadership experience in startups big & small. If you enjoy this article, please consider joining Medium to support Jonathan and thousands of other authors.