A Little Bit More

Introduction

I dropped into a story in the Vocal Social Society, by a great author that had been there for a few days. Facebook said it had no comments, and as I am a VSS "Group Expert" it suggested I leave a comment.

The music is the cheesy Dr Hook song "A Little Bit More", this was from when they had hit paydirt, but their early stuff, especially with Shel Silverstein, is brilliant.

I often see posts by people I see as big Vocal Stars and don't go in because of time but also because I am sure that they will be getting a lot of attention so maybe I am not necessary. I do feel that I do not read enough Vocal stories and my apologies to everyone if you do feel ignored by me. Feel free to poke me with a sharp stick to get my attention.

Anyway back to that story, I do get easily sidetracked, I dropped in and it had one Vocal Heart. Now I know I don't know how many reads it had, it could have been a thousand, but with just one heart and one comment, I felt a little shocked. I left a comment and a read, but that was just one person doing that.

So what can we do about this?

Read and Reciprocate

I don't think we can spot reads as Vocal won't publish reads on stories, just in their flawed stats report, so I can't see how many reads that people have had. Paul Stewart produced a "Deep Cuts" series that promoted stories that deserved more reads but I am not sure what the criteria were, but it is a worthy idea. This is one example and you can find more on his profile.

In The Vocal Social Society, we encourage people to share their work but also read and comment on others. We started a thread today where we ask people to post their tenth Vocal story and read two more, you can read and add yours here.

While you can get reads by dropping them in the right groups outside of Vocal, reciprocity in the Facebook Groups will return reads to you and boost your vocal earning.

Although I have shared it many times this piece by Judey Kalchik provides great insights into why we should reciprocate.

There are many articles promoting this on Vocal, I have done many myself but will close this with a poem listing my favourite Vocal Groups and some of the many Vocal Members whom I have the pleasure of reciprocating with (that sounds almost rude doesn't it? Or maybe it is just the way my mind works), but here is one by KJ Aartila.

Conclusion

We are all only one person and we may think one read by us may make no difference, but for that creator, it may be going from no reads to one, or one read to two, and that is a big jump.

This is why I chose this title, you may be about to leave, but just drop into one more story, read it, and leave a comment and then the creator definitely knows that you have been there.

As I have said before I am terrible for not reading and commenting, but I do try, and I also try and create ways for people to share. It is why I have my Creationati section on my profile, so you can see some of the Vocal Creators that I respect and try to read when they publish.

I will leave you with two of my pieces where I have tried to be reciprocal.