How to make big bucks on Vocal

Disclaimer: this is not meant to be a serious article, nor a serious critique.

So I've been here for around (January 2024) and I've just recently hit the 20$ mark - pardon, 21. Numbers are important since this is the minimum amount required to actually pull the money out of Vocal.

Now that's well and good. Admittedly I've not been particularly aggressive with my updates - just uploading stories, mostly poetry, every now and then.

But it's crucial to say that only 1.81$ are from actual reads. The most money I come from making it to top story:

• The end of books as we know them
• To kill Samsa
• Men Like Us
• Unspirited Away

Unsurprisingly top stories also get more reads: on top of the 5 dollars flat, I got another buck over time for people clicking in.

My 1+ year so far as amounted to a Starbuck's latte and (maybe) a Subway sandwich. Luckily enough I don't do this for a living.

Now don't get me wrong, these are rookie numbers. I'm sure the top authors here will have a different experience (and also will curate their content). Still, I think my case is somewhat interesting as a baseline. I barely spam my work on social media: most of my reads come from inside Vocal itself.

If I were to monetize this - and happily join yet another commodification pipeline - it appears I should try to hack into the "top story" selection mechanism, buy a bathtub, and proceed to fill it up with 5$ notes.

I am, of course, being facetious. I am generally skeptical of the whole 'turning art into content' idea, but I'd be stupid if I didn't recognize this has been the trend over the internet for a significantly long time.

And admittedly this is the closest I've ever been to writing a potentially trending article ("how to" stories sell, especially an "how to make bucks").

In "To know your market is to know your enemy (substack)" I argued that we all compete in the attention market, one way or another. Yet again, my little experiment over here confirms that short stories are quite a dead market, or maybe I should say "money-unwise". Poetry... well, poetry is poetry.

I'll stop the rambling over here. Of course like and subscribe for other quite deranged opinions.