My First Read Dollar

Introduction

This is an old piece that I wrote about getting my first dollar on Vocal. I have tidied it up a bit, but I don't think anyone I know on Vocal now will have read this, so here it is.

This is when it was six hundred words, or a hundred words for a poem.

My First Read Dollar

I started on Vocal on the 18th of April 2021 with this post, and in two months, I have earned just over a dollar for reads. This may not sound much, and for anyone just here to make money may not sound too enticing, but the benefits of being here are really worth the membership.

I don’t think anyone is on Vocal to make money, but it is a nice by-product, and the more you get read, the more you make, but it's also a gauge of how people are interacting with you and in the two months I’ve had around 200 reads, which is only about three a day, but it is a start.

One of my problems is that while I have a vibrant social media presence, I don’t really follow that many people. I see many people getting lots then see they are following thousands of others. Of course, those followers will mean that you will get seen by the people you follow when you post, but I feel I would lose control and lose track.

On Vocal, I was thinking I would like to know who put a heart on my posts and who was reading my posts, but then I started thinking further.

If that happened, you would start to see the growth of cliques who would maybe like and read each other's work to the exclusion of others. At the moment, we don’t know who reads our posts. They have to pass muster when you submit them for approval, and only then can they be read on the Vocal platform.

The Vocal approvers have lists of favourite authors, and while that may generate a bit of jealousy (how do you become a favourite Vocal author?), it is the way Vocal should stay, in my opinion.

I have corresponded with a single Vocal author (Valerie Rowe) so far via her Instagram profile, and she was extremely pleasant and supportive, and I read a few of her posts, so if you want to interact with other Vocal authors at the moment, it needs to be outside of Vocal.

I nearly didn’t write this piece as I thought it was similar to other posts in actually eulogising the benefits of Vocal. There are apparently 750K Vocal creators and an external audience of 9 million readers, so your work can get a wide readership if it hits the right notes with the audience.

Part of my reason for being here is, like my blog, the hope that ideas will come, words will flow, and I can start to write that book. It may happen or not, but Vocal is certainly keeping me producing words and articles.

One of the other benefits is that I have actually taken to composing music and learning to play the guitar again. I learnt to play a version of The Rolling Stones’ “Happy” today and am minded to do a recording and put it on my YouTube channel. It will be just me, my drum machine and guitar, but that is fine.

I also created my first minimalist piece on a 4-track studio app called J4T on my Amazon Kindle Fire and used it as the lead piece in my post "On Writing … On Vocal" (this has now been repurposed, but the piece is below), and it got me a five-dollar bonus.

So, whether it’s right or not, I feel that Vocal is restarting my overall creativity, not just writing, and if you have got this far and you are wondering whether to put doing on here. Do it, just do it.

I’m almost shocked at how much I have written in these two months, and I feel I have hardly started, but I will continue.

Writing on Vocal is making me very happy, so we can share my favourite Rolling Stones song, “Happy”, for you to listen to as you read this.

Conclusion

This is where I was five years ago. Thank you for reading (or reading again).