Vocal Reviews

I got an email inviting me to try the contest on the Vocal site Figured I would give it a try Followed the link paid the 1 for the account Published the story but vocal would not confirm if the story was entered into the contest the story was confirmed and published to the site still no indication that it had been entered into the contest I had realized that when they announced the winners that my story was not listed as one of those being in the contest Now I think my story was pretty good and at least deserved a chance to be entered They should have at least had some type of notification that the story was entered The second issue with the site is exposure If you publish your stories there you are but a drop in their ocean The already established authors rule the publications Unless you had already established yourself you will be completely unkown on this site My stories were on this site for 2 weeks and I made 3 cents When I checking into the list my story was lost in the thousands who were publishing as well A big example of their sea was that almost 9000 stories were entered into the contest I was trying to enter They gave themselves a week to judge the stories Which is 1200 stories a day or 52 stories an hour There is no way you could evaluate all the stories fairly entered into the contest I did not give them one star because they do have a good idea for the site They have executed the site pretty well and have deleted the stories I published fairly quickly when requested There are just so many authors that you are lost trying to get exposure for your work I myself do not write to make millions I just love telling stories and providing escape to those who read my work thanks Stan

I ve been on Vocal for a year now and at first I was very excited about the challenges I love writing short stories and having a prompt for a contest is motivating to me Now I don t mean to be pompous but after every contest winner is announced I am shocked As a long time writer in the craft I can confidently say that the winners wouldn t even get a B in composition class The most recent winner had misspelled words in their story The second place winner had an entire paragraph without any punctuation Not a single period How on Earth can that be the winner No hook no pacing mostly telling and not showing and overall too boring to finish reading It seems they choose their winners at random I submitted my recent story entree to several critique FaceBook Groups who are often very forthcoming with their negative feedback and only received high praise for my work I ran the piece by beta readers and an editor I am confident it was a solid piece Now I would feel differently if the winner s story was actually well-written and intriguing I d be disappointed but say okay that s fair It s really good and deserves the win The fact that the winners are often if not always amateur writers and many reviewers on here agree makes me lose faith in the platform Another notable strange thing about Vocal is that there is no messaging or public reads displayed So we have no way of verifying if the winners are real people or even to complain about the poor writing I don t think Vocal is a scam in the sense that they will steal your money but something is off How can a writing platform not know how to choose well-written contest winners

I signed up for Vocal about six months ago to enter a poem in one of their competitions After signing up I started getting charged 9 99 a month to continue my membership I didn t agree to this but decided to continue paying to keep entering the competition prompts they posted monthly I haven t won anything but I did eventually get one of my stories featured as a Top Story The odds are not in your favor with this site I earned 5 after publishing my fifth story on Vocal then 10 after publishing my tenth I earned 20 for publishing my top story Being a Vocal member for six months has cost me 60 and my Vocal wallet still only has just over 32 in it The extra 2 is accumulated from the cents I earn from readers who view my stories I post They say you can make up to 6k a month as a member but you don t profit at all On top of that Stripe the cash withdrawing app Vocal is connected to is a scam It s the only app Vocal offers to withdraw the money out of your Vocal wallet I have tried to download it multiple times and each time I ve tried to I just get a bunch of questions asking me personal questions what is my SSN what is the passcode to my iPhone my license number etc and tons of pop up ads There s no option to use a safer connection like PayPal or Venmo I entered two last contests this month and I m waiting for the results but after this I m going to finally delete my account

May be good vocals but nothing is catchy- not a great selection - for my taste i wont find a hit For my taste overpriced - rather stay with SoundBetter

Well I signed up using my phone initially I then tried to sign in to my account on my laptop That didn t work Via my phone the email has been confirmed and the first month of V has been paid for but on my laptop it recognizes me as a different user I ve contacted help from Vocal but so far all I ve received is a letter saying they received the letter about my issue and will get to as soon as possible I stated I was trying to enter a contest that deadlines today So far nothing I have the story uploaded on my laptop identity hoping the two had been merged which doesn t seem to be such a big problem to fix but nope I was hoping then pull up the file on my phone and submit it Nope I even submitted my own photo on the story they require some form of artwork with the stories Frustrating

The contests are most likely scams Look at the winners The writing is pretty terrible Could it really be that all the submissions were that mediocre There is no way in my opinion that they are able to read and vet all submissions in less than two weeks and the quality of the winning submissions attests to this Don t waste your money on this if you are in it for the contests

I had hundreds of thousand of reads I made some money they take a long time to send the money when you request cash out but they ve never not paid me They began censoring my investigative articles once they became bigger They used a legitimate photo as an excuse to take down an article on an associate of Jeffrey Epstein which was all well sourced and full of evidence They used one of my articles to promote how to make money on their site but I didn t make that much You still have to do all the marketing and promotion they don t even check grammar and spelling It s pretty obviously an attempt to flood social media platforms with average safe content It is not good for journalists and people investigating corruption I was really hoping that they would be better but they failed

I recently joined vocal after seeing a contest posted The contest required that the first sentence of your story begin with their specific prompt In this instance the story must begin with Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space or so they say The rules clearly state your story must begin with this sentence anything after is up to you There were some good submissions with over 1400 in total I believe First prize was 10 000 2nd prize was 2 500 with 25 runner ups getting 50 I had no illusions I would win but the dream was nice One of the runner up posts was a new twist on little red riding hood called Red Moon The problem was this story was published on the site 2 years ago Nowhere in the first paragraph or whole story for that matter was the specific prompt sentence I m not sure how these are judged or if they re random lottery as someone has suggested I doubt I will continue my subscription

I recently ordered and received two personalize logo Harley-Davidson baseball Jersey shirts On the very same day when I wore them the buttons started coming off when I started checking the remaining buttons SEVERAL of them we re already on the verge of also falling off due to them not being properly secured to the fabric These baseball Jerseys were VERY POORLY MADE and not worth the money that I paid for them

I m giving them two stars for being a decent enough platform and a star for their milestone bonus program They lose three stars for an underdeveloped tech platform poor customer service and censorship To be fair Vocal is best for people writing fiction and poetry - that seems to be their real bread and butter Opinion or think pieces like mine are there but they don t seem to do as well I don t think Vocal does a good job of promoting new writers or writers that could use a little boost I see the same names over and over It s probably a money-driven decision which I get but very very few people make any real money here Their milestone bonus program is pretty nice I don t know of any other blogging platform paying people for bonuses just for publishing I don t remember what the milestones are your 20th article your 50th whatever And they re decent sums I think I made more on 1 5 years on Vocal than I did in twice that time on Medium I was a paying subscriber for awhile but the small monthly fee is more for those living outside the US because of the exchange rate And I wasn t getting the views or the support - I got a featured story exactly once and it was a fluffier piece about a celebrity The tech platform isn t as developed as it could be - The downside of using Vocal is they don t have a version backup so that if you accidentally delete a chunk of content you re working on and you don t realize it before you save your work which you have to do as Vocal also doesn t have autosave you lose that work You can t retrieve a previous version like on Substack The platform is terrible when you re trying to highlight something to format it - it jumps around the project highlights the wrong stuff and often deletes stuff You have to watch this platform with an eagle eye and when I had to spend an evening re-creating an article I hadn t realized was missing two-thirds of it because I d accidentally deleted something I moved to creating on Substack went back to being a free Vocal member and used it only as a copy-and-paste for previously published work One big warning NEVER let Vocal be the only place for your content Have a copy somewhere else if just in your own storage because they ve got no backup system for your content the way Facebook Twitter and Medium have got If you get shut down without warning - and I was - you lose it all Since I publish my work in multiple places I lost nothing Vocal was extremely unprofessional in how it handled an issue with one or more of my stories They suspended my account for hate speech allegedly for a few articles but the only one they named was one critical of the trans movement and its abuse of the English language So I assume it was woke complaints since I didn t call for harm threats violence or genocide against the trans movement - I am however quite critical of the misogynist homophobic elements within it I got no notice or any communication there was a problem with my account One moment it was there the next moment it wasn t - in fact I saw it disappear but I assumed it was a tech flake on Vocal s part A few days later it was still down so I emailed tech support - three times - and got nothing Finally in response to a marketing email from info I replied back saying I had no account with them and no one seems to care Got a response saying it had been escalated and sent to Vocal support who didn t get back to me for a few days only to tell me I was suspended for hate speech by some kid who clearly doesn t know how to handle a customer her employer has unfairly treated I was polite no abuse no swearing I had to push for more information and all I got out of her was one allegedly offending article There was no opportunity to review the article or be offered the chance to rewrite it or delete it I probably would have done the latter I found it extremely unprofessional and for these reasons I don t recommend Vocal as anything more than a copy-and-paste platform and not if your views are controversial i e not woke enough unless your specialty is fiction and poetry otherwise you might find it more successful Just know that very very people make much money off it similar to other platforms that pay Medium s truly successful writers as of a few years ago were 10 OnlyFans as I understand it is largely the same In the end it was no big deal as I was already thinking about abandoning Vocal altogether anyway Even cutting pasting an article is too much trouble as you lose all the formatting and have to add hyperlinks bold italic quotes etc But it should be understood they censor content have an autocratic system of handling problems And their technology is still stuck in 2004