A Mountain of Content (Moved With an Eye Dropper)

As folks who've been around this blog for a while know, I tend to keep a lot of plates spinning at any given time. I also run the gaming blog Improved Initiative, for example, in addition to blogging for clients, writing books like the sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife and the short story collection The Rejects that came out earlier this year. However, I've also been expanding my Vocal archive of articles for some time now... and I've got an update on what I've come to call The Great Reshuffling.

It's finally done. And for this week's Craft of Writing post, I wanted to talk about this back-breaking project that's taken me nearly a year to finally complete.

And let me tell you... it was a PROJECT!

What Was The Great Reshuffling?

For those who don't know, I had a pretty hefty article archive over on InfoBarrel for a while. It was never a big earner, but I got a check every month or so for my earnings. However, over the past several years the site just drew less and less traffic, which meant my work over there got fewer and fewer views. There weren't any other websites like it that I knew of (that is to say, sites where you could write whatever you wanted and earn money based on your traffic) so I just sort of let it die and tried to focus on other stuff.

Then I discovered Vocal.

And the numbers started jumping.

I've talked about this site before in both Want To Make Some Money Writing? Check Out Vocal! and then the updated post Looking To Make Some Money Writing? Check Out Vocal+ that I wrote when they launched their new Vocal+ membership program. The short version is that for every 1k reads your work receives (that's 1k reads total, not on a per-article basis), you receive a fee. With the normal, free site it's $3, and with the Vocal+ program it's $6. I'd been on Vocal for a year and some change, and I'd written a lot of articles for it, but I was having a hard time justifying the cost to pay for the Vocal+ members program.

And that was when I remembered I had a huge archive of stuff (some of which was pretty popular when I first wrote it) that I could just move to a new home. As such, I figured it was time to take my own advice from back in Recycling is Key To Being a Successful Author. So after emailing Vocal and InfoBarrel alike to make sure no terms of service were being violated, and that no one was going to raise a fuss, I started going through my old content, updating stuff that needed updated, and pushing it over to my Vocal archive.

And now, a little over a year later, roughly 100 of the best articles from that old archive have found their new home.

What Sort of Stuff Got Added To My Vocal Archive?

One of the biggest items that got moved over was what I dubbed my character conversion series. For readers who aren't regulars over on Improved Initiative, these were guides I wrote for tabletop gamers who wanted to recreate particular characters in their games. So whether you wanted to play a version of Tyrion Lannister, Guts from the anime Berserk, or to capture the essence of historical figures like Andrew Jackson or Harriet Tubman, these guides were a great starting point for Pathfinder players.

There's more on the list. A LOT more.

There are 68 guides in this series over at the Character Conversions contents list at time of writing, and roughly 50 of them were moved over from my InfoBarrel archive to Vocal. And they all got updates and facelifts along the way to include new content that hadn't been written at the time I first wrote them.

But what about the other half of the content? Well, it runs the gamut. However, some of the more popular articles that have now found a new home include:

- 5 True Facts About Dolph Lundgren
- Home Remedies For Your Cat's Urinary Tract Infection
- How To Kick in a Door
- The Vikings, Not Columbus, Were The First Europeans in The Americas
- What Was The Satanic Panic? The Forgotten Witch Hunt of The 1980s

And that's just a sample!

My current Vocal archive is just under 170 articles, and I've got a list of stuff I'm planning on adding to it now that the old content is buffed, catalogued, and ready for perusal. So if you're spending some more time in quarantine and you need some stuff to read, why not stop on in and see what I've got to offer? Between the new stuff that's going up all the time, and the old stuff you may have missed, there's quite a trove!

So go check out my Vocal archive today! And if you've got suggestions for more topics you'd like to see me cover, leave a comment below.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my short story collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!