My Christmas Wish List To Vocal

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and there will be plenty of children watching out for Santa to come down the chimney and place under the carefully decorated tree all the items they've wished for. I'm past the age of writing wish lists to Father Christmas, yet this year I've decided to make an exception, and address my list to a platform we all love: Vocal Media.

I've been having so much fun publishing on Vocal lately, that I'm feeling slightly guilty asking for more. I can never say enough times how grateful I am for this platform to exist, as it allows me to publish my writing and challenges me to expand my creativity and skill. Besides, it's so clean and easy to use!

But it's all in the name, isn't it? So let me be vocal.

Because there's always room to improve, here are a few ideas of how the platform could become even better for the user. I believe some suggestions will be useful to enthusiastic readers on the platform, while others will rather concern us writers (with a few special perks for Vocal+ members).

Subscription notifications

Vocal allows its users to subscribe to creators that they love. When they do that, they can find these creators' new stories in their feed. This sounds great, but here's the catch: it takes three clicks to access this hidden feed, and you don't get notified whenever a writer you like has published a new story: you have to check it out manually. So here's the first item on my wish list: Dear Vocal, it would be so very nice if the subscription feed was more easily accessible, for instance next to the Top Stories on the home page, or in the top menu. But more importantly, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to get notifications when our favorite artists have new stories in!

User to-read list

Personally, I don't always have time to read stories that interest me as soon as they catch my eye on Vocal. Am I the only one? So far, here's what I've been doing to get around this issue: I "heart" these stories even before reading them, so that I can find them back in "Stories you liked" once I have time to read. This hack is not ideal though: my to-read stories get mixed up with the stories I've already read and "hearted" because I definitely liked them.

So Vocal, for Christmas, I would love it if you could give us a little "save" button next to the stories' "heart", so that they get queued into a reading list for later!

Feedback option

When a creator submits a story, they are given the option to allow comments or not on the publication. Comments can be nice, especially as the Vocal community is very supportive, in our experience. However, sometimes an author is looking for constructive (emphasis on constructive) criticism from their readership. If a similar button asked you whether you wanted to allow the reader to give suggestions for improvement on your writing, would you toggle it?

This does beg the question, however, of whether such feedback should be private or public. Any thoughts, dear reader?

Jury feedback on challenge stories

Another type of feedback that would be useful, would be from the Vocal experts themselves. Namely, the Vocal Jury. We know that they're constantly flooded with submissions, especially when challenges are out (which, thankfully for us, is almost always), but it would be absolutely invaluable for Vocal+ members to receive feedback from them after a challenge. What was the decisive thing in our submission that made us lose a particular challenge? Where can we improve our writing, tighten our story, build on our craft? More than winning a prize, such feedback from Vocal would, in the opinion of several of us authors, be a massive attraction to keep pouring our soul and energy into stories and submitting them to challenges.

Detailed feedback is probably too much to ask the Vocal Jury. But maybe a grading system with summary statistics of our writing could be a faster way to provide feedback on the main points that the Jury is looking at when they review and select challenge submissions. Below is an example of what I mean: a grade on a bunch of criteria, which you could access directly in your Vocal account.

I don't know what Vocal's criteria are when they judge submissions, and I imagine they might change depending on the type of challenge (poetry, journalling, etc.). To give you a better idea of what I mean, in the case of fiction, I imagine some possible criteria could be:

- Originality

- Strong narrative

- Character arc

- Dialogue

- Theme

- Emotion

- Pacing

But these are just some ideas, and I'm sure Vocal has their own behind-the-scene grading system when selecting challenge winners. The question is whether or not it's possible to share it with the contestants after the challenge results come out.

Vocal RSS Feed

If you don't have a blog or website of your own, this item may not concern you. But if you do, you might have wanted to showcase all your amazing Vocal stories directly into your website (here's my own for example). At the moment, the only way to do that is to go and edit your website to add the picture, title, and link manually, for each story. Quite cumbersome.

Most social platforms provide an RSS feed, which is a useful little tool that you can embed into a website, and which updates automatically as soon as you post something new on a social platform, and shows it in your website, with the proper formatting. As far as I know, Vocal doesn't have that, and I wish they did. Am I the only one?

Full edit mode for Vocal+ members

If you're a Vocal+ member, you probably enjoy the freedom of Quick Edit. This feature is great, as it allows you to make small edits to your post after it's been published on the platform. For example if you've made a typo somewhere in your text. However, it only allows you to change the body of the text. Why? Typos can also happen when you write your title and subtitle! Also, what happens when you realize the cover image you've chosen doesn't render as well as you thought it would once your story is published? Of course, you can always contact Vocal directly, and they'll make those changes for you (pretty efficiently, may I add), so thank you for that, Vocal moderators! But wouldn't it be simpler for everyone if we could make those changes ourselves?

No quality loss on pictures

The main way to attract readership for Vocal stories is the picture. I'll admit, I also fall prey to this: the visual might be decisive on whether I even read the title of an article, and therefore, whether I end up clicking to read the story. If you upload a photograph you've taken yourself, chances are you have a high quality picture which you want to showcase to attract readers to your awesome story. Vocal asks to provide them pictures with at least 1280 x 780 pixels, yet it's been brought to my attention that the resolution gets reduced once it's published. How frustrating!

Hopefully the difference in quality will show in this example, even after publication. So, is there any way to maintain the high picture quality after publication?

We've reached the end of my Christmas wish list. Thank you for reading! I'd love to know what you think of these suggested features, dear reader. Do you agree with my list? Is there something you wish had been on there?

A big shout-out to all the amazing vocal creators who reached out to me as I was writing this article and shared with me their own wishes. Some of the features listed above, I wouldn't even have thought of without you! You're all great, and I hope I portrayed your wishes accurately! I’d love to hear from you in the comments <3

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