Why I Finally Cancelled My Vocal Media Subscription After 7 Months
The experience was wonderful while it lasted, but its shortcomings outweigh the benefits
After seven months of writing on Vocal, today I cancelled my subscription.
Vocal was my first foray into the intimidating world of online writing. I joined at the tail end of December and have published 57 stories on the site since then. I have earned $1922.62. Fourteen of my stories were selected as ‘top stories,’ and I was recently featured in one of Vocal’s Creator Spotlights.
Despite this, over the past week months, I have felt disillusioned with the writing website. These negative feelings grew and festered, culminating in the cancellation of my membership today.
Let’s talk about it.
The Good
I know there are a lot of pieces floating around shitting on Vocal as a writing website. While I agree that most of those criticisms are valid, I think we should begin this story with some of its positives.
- External views factor into earnings
Vocal makes no distinction between internal and external views. It doesn’t matter whether or not the reader is a paying member. If they scroll far enough into your story, it will count as a read.
2. Readers can leave tips on your stories
If a reader enjoys your story, they have the option of leaving you a small tip of $1, $5, $10 or $20. I have received $198 in tips since joining Vocal.
3. Promotional pricing on the Vocal+ Membership
You can post on Vocal for free, but a subscription to their Vocal+ membership comes with the added benefit of access to their weekly challenge prizes, lower cash-out thresholds and higher earnings. This will cost you $9.99 per month. However, in my almost seven months on the site, I’ve only ever incurred this fee twice. In my first two months, I took advantage of a promotion that they were having and received two months free. Then, randomly four months into my membership, Vocal offered me three months free.
The Bad
Now onto the bad. The bad is distinct from the ugly. While I found these elements of the site to be annoying, they didn’t push me to run for the hills. Yet.
- Vocal pays diddly squat for reads
I know I said I earned $1922.62 from Vocal in seven months, but only $74.62 of that came from reads. $1500 came from placing in two of their writing challenges, $198 from tips and $150 from bonuses.
Vocal pays out at a rate of $3.80 per 1000 views for non-members and $6 per 1000 for Vocal+ members. This means that you need 1667 views just to break even on the $10 membership fee.
Vocal doesn’t have an active readership, so there are few organic views. Unless you self-promote like crazy, your stat counter will not move. You stand to earn pennies on Vocal unless you have 1667 friends willing to click on the articles you chuck into their DMs.
2. Clunky editing software that makes Windows XP seem high tech
Vocal’s editor is a constant source of annoyance. It doesn’t autosave anything. I can’t count the number of times I’ve written a story, forgot to hit ‘save changes’ and closed the window, only to realize much later that all of my hard work was gone.
There’s also little in the way of formatting tools. No distinction in the body of stories between title and subtitle headings. No way to remove or add double spacing for poetry. At publishing, the editor deletes any special line spacing and structural liberties poets take in crafting their work.
The editor also tends to glitch, so the first photo or title you choose when saving your story is what will appear when you share it, even if you decided on something different before publishing.
The funny thing is I’ve contacted support multiple times about these glitches, and their response is always that I should avoid putting a title or picture until I’m sure about it because the editor is glitchy. Well… are you planning to, I don’t know, fix the damn editor?
3. Inconsistent moderation times
A human moderator must review every piece of work that is published on Vocal. This is because they have content restrictions on religious pieces. You can’t publish straight to your profile because they’re afraid that you might sneak Jesus in there somewhere.
Vocal is wildly inconsistent with its turnaround times for story moderation. Sometimes I wait less than an hour for stories to be published; other times I’ve waited as long as five days. The worst is discovering an error after publishing your story. You used to have to reach out to support to place the story back into your drafts, wait 24 hours for a response, fix the error and then start the wretched submission process all over again.
It was maddening. Vocal has introduced a new Quick Edit feature that allows you to edit the body of your story with a few clicks. However, fixing major elements like the title or the cover photo still requires the intervention of support. It’s worth noting that this feature is only available to paying members.
The Ugly
The stuff that made me think, “I need to leave this madhouse.”
- No sense of community or organization on the website
You can’t follow other creators on Vocal — although the company has expressed the desire to introduce this feature soon. There is also no option to comment on the work of other writers. Or save their stories in a list for later reading. You can like other stories, but all the same, there is no historical record of the stories that you’ve liked.
The communities on Vocal are also unclear and random. Stories may only belong to one community and fall under a single tag — which limits the number of people who see your story. Also, stories tend to overlap, so it’s an odd restriction.
For example, say I write a fictional short story about a lesbian couple who is in the middle of a divorce when an elf appears and whisks them away into a magical world. I may want to chuck this under the Vocal communities Pride, Fiction or Humans but I’m forced to choose one. When I choose Fiction, I can then only select one tag to label the story. Do I go ‘romance,’ ‘fantasy’ or opt for the less descriptive ‘short story?’
It is a frustrating organizational choice. And I think it’s intentional. If they structure their website properly, allow creators to save stories, follow each other and update their communities and tags, they might create something that looks vaguely like an algorithm. That means creators will grow their following. They’ll have to pay them more. And under no circumstances can that happen.
2. Rewards bells and whistles rather than quality writing
Unless you’re self-promoting 24/7, the only other way to gain traction on your stories is by receiving a coveted Top Story spot. Top Stories are those that are placed on Vocal’s landing page. They update this list every day and you earn a $5 bonus for every Top Story spot you land.
While a lot of the stories posted there are wonderful, some are real head-scratchers. From my observations, if your story’s not great, you can make it front-page worthy by writing about Vocal, copy-pasting a Wikipedia article about some current topic you have little to no knowledge about or peppering your article with a mountain of GIFs. Alternatively, you can opt not to run your story through any spellcheck program or write about something nonsensical, weird or irrelevant that no one in their right mind would think to Google. That’s what makes the front page these days.
Only a select few stories get chosen every day, so on Vocal, it’s a kind of metric for how good your work is. Everyone fights to prove that their work is the best. As I mentioned, you can’t follow people on Vocal. Therefore, Top Stories are the only way to ensure your work gets seen by everyone.
Vocal differs from other writing websites because your landing page doesn’t change depending on what you select as your interests. There’s no way for readers — if the site even has dedicated readers — to narrow what’s shown to them. Thousands of creators must tailor their work to impress the moderators in the slim chance that their stories get picked.
I hate it.
I hate feeling like I have to suck Vocal’s proverbial dick for my work to be recognized. I don’t want to litter my stories with GIFs. Don’t get me wrong, I think the odd GIF can enhance what is being said. But if your story needs GIFs to stand on its own two feet, I think it’s time to reevaluate your writing.
3. No transparency about the judging criteria for Vocal challenges
I’ve placed in two of Vocal’s non-fiction challenges. Vocal hosts challenges on a host of fiction and non-fiction topics with prizes ranging from $1000 to $20,000.
The writing platform is very cagey about the criteria used in judging these competitions. On their website, they use buzzwords like originality, emotion and storytelling skill. Vocal also claims moderators weed entries down to the last 15 before passing off this shortlist to “expert judges.”
This process is problematic for several reasons. Most recently, Vocal hosted a $20,000 short story challenge that had a whopping 9,455 entries. The period between the end of the challenge and the release of the results was 2 weeks. It’s unclear whether moderators disqualify entries before approving them or if they comb through them after the challenge closes.
So many questions! If they disqualify them immediately, is the story read by more than one moderator? What literary qualifications does that moderator possess to judge a fiction competition? If after, how many moderators are there such that they can read 9,455 stories in two weeks (675 per day) and make a shortlist in a way that’s fair to all who entered?
Don’t expect any NYC Midnight level commentary on the winners of Vocal challenges. Even for big-money fiction challenges, Vocal never releases the specific rationale for how they selected the winners.
Sometimes winning entries are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Other times, they are laced with religious imagery which, if you recall, is against their community guidelines. One time, two of the winning entries for a Shakespearean sonnet challenge weren’t Shakespearean sonnets.
It’s a mess.
Final Thoughts
I am thankful to Vocal for introducing me to the exciting world of online writing. The experience was wonderful while it lasted, but its shortcomings outweigh the benefits. I can’t justify spending $9.99 every month on the platform while having to exercise the energy of a full-time job just to get my work read.
I imagine I’ll still repost some of my work there from time to time. Though, it’s unlikely I’ll create original content. It just isn’t worth it. At all.