An Interview With Medium Boost Nominator Ben Ulansey

Tips and tricks for finding success on Medium and Substack

Hello friends!

Today, I’d like to introduce you to

Ben Ulansey

. Ben is well known for his poetic and thoughtful work on Medium. He’s relatively new to Substack, and his publication

The Gen Z Report

is worth checking out.

I enjoy reading his writing because he has a kind and humanitarian perspective. Also, it’s interesting to see how younger people are navigating similar challenges to what I had to endure when I was their age. Often, I can read something by Ben and it churns up a memory that I hadn’t thought about in years.

Ben’s publication on Medium is called Thought Thinkers. Ben is a Boost nominator, and this is a valuable publication to know about. I suggest you all check it out and read the articles. Perhaps it will inspire you to write and submit something amazing.

An interview with Ben Ulansey

Walter: I’d like to start off by asking you to give us a little more information about your background and how you were drawn to writing on Medium and now on Substack:

Ben: I learned in 9th grade that I loved to write, but it wasn’t until well after high school that I ever pursued a leisurely writing project. Prior to 2016 or so, most of my writing was in the form of Facebook screeds and online political arguments with peers. I dipped my feet into journalism twice, but my recent stint with the profession from 2021–2022 left me feeling eager to write just about anything else. In short, a few too many miserable journalism assignments helped me to decide that I’d rather write what I want to write. 

That revelation, in conjunction with the couple of amazing articles I’d read on Medium prior to joining, was what inspired me to begin really pursuing this passion. Even while I still consider Medium to be my primary home as a writer, the move to Substack was rooted in wanting to find a steadier income for my work.

At best, my monthly income on Medium has soared into the thousands. But sometimes, a change in algorithm will result in night and day differences for writers. Beginning this summer, many of us have experienced such a shift. If I want this career to be sustainable, these regular updates and monthly fluctuations of $1000+ can be a little problematic. Yet despite that degree of uncertainty, Medium has proven a better home than I could have ever possibly imagined when I began this career writing online and I’m deeply thankful for everything it’s given me. 

The world of Substack is still new terrain for me, but I’m excited to see what happens.

Walter: What are you trying to achieve with Thought Thinkers? What kind of themes are you most interested in exploring? How have your aspirations for the publication changed or evolved over time?

Ben: A lot of my approach to my publication is centered around achieving balance, both in subject matter and in how our submissions are edited. I think I describe the sort of variety we’re looking for in our submission guidelines pretty well: 

“…We want to read some roller-coaster of a memoir about that time you swam into South Africa on magic mushrooms, when you drove a tuk tuk into a conflict zone, or when you smoked weed for the first time in half a decade and bumped into a hippopotamus.

We welcome poetry, prose, politics, humor, memoirs, essays, reviews, satire, op-eds, philosophical treatises, and just about anything you can throw our way!

We want pieces that evoke emotional responses, whether sadness, laughter, awe, mild confusion, or the sudden and irrepressible urge to Macarena dance. We want articles that teach our readers something that they never knew before — that explore new ideas (or explore old ideas in new ways).

We want to hear about how McDonald’s can lead us toward world peace, how foreigners are confused with robots, why you miss your old BlackBerry cellphone, what you learned from starting a podcast, or why you think it’s more important than ever to vote and become politically active. We want to think critically about religion, social issues, AI, politics, the nature of liberty, and what it means to be a part of this changing world.”

Being a publication owner can be an interesting tightrope to walk at times. On one hand, I’ve sometimes taken issue with publications that go out of their way to impose unnecessary rules and restrictions on their writers. So I’ve tried to foster an air of openness. I’ve also tried to keep our writers aware that, at the end of the day, Medium publications are not the New York Times or The Atlantic, and editors don’t have the resources to make them into anything so prestigious. 

Our project at Thought Thinkers (and at most publications) is more communal than that. It operates under constraints that the standard newspaper or magazine does not. I still take pride in what we publish and maintain a team of editors who won’t let just anything pass. But I think one of the aspects that makes my approach different from many other publication editors I’ve spoken with is that I try not to treat things too seriously. I’m thrilled with whatever success we find, and don’t blame myself, my writers, or my editors for whatever failures we confront. 

Gradually, as our following and base of contributors has grown, we’ve cultivated more of an ability to enforce standards. But Medium’s multiculturalism is one of its strongest assets, so sometimes with writers from different parts of the world — who may be writing in English as a second, third, or fourth language — it feels important to offer a certain leniency. Deciding where precisely that quality bar falls has been a continual challenge, and it’s one that makes me sympathetic to the struggles that curators go through in trying to create consistent quality standards across the platform.

Walter: What are you doing with The Gen Z report? How does that publication differ from Thought Thinkers, and what are your initial impressions of Substack?

Ben: The Gen Z Report is more of an extension of my own profile on Medium than it is the publication under my name. Coming up with the name was a bit of a challenge, because I wanted it to encompass a very wide variety of subjects. On Medium, there’s little I haven’t tried writing about, and I hope that versatility can serve me similarly on Substack. 

As on Medium, it seems there are some subjects that tend to perform better than others. With the election season nearing, I’ve leaned more frequently into politics than I’ve tended to with my Medium profile. I believe that’s been my best performing subject. I’ve begun to wonder whether my entertainment pieces will find success under that same “The Gen Z Report” umbrella. 

Basically, The Gen Z Report is the world through my perspective, and I hope that in putting my thoughts onto paper that I can be an effective representative of this younger generation. Whether that entails me talking politics, cinema, social issues, humor, or about my experiences growing up in a digital world, it’s all fair game. Just about everything I publish here will be filtered through my lens on life. Because I have the publication currently arranged into sections, readers have the ability to subscribe or unsubscribe to specific topics at their leisure. 

So far, Substack has been very promising. Financial growth is a little harder than the early days of Medium, but momentum also seems to build more quickly. The roof seems higher. I’m shocked to say that most of my Substack articles are already being viewed more than they are on Medium, even while that hasn’t resulted in a lot of tangible pay just yet. 

Walter: What are your writing goals beyond Medium? What do you hope to achieve? 100 years from now, what will people say about Ben Ulansey, the writer?

Ben: I have goals that are loftier than might be considered healthy. Beginning at a young age, I’ve had visions of changing the world for the better. But growing up, I was never quite sure what form that would take. I knew only that I’d probably never take a very conventional route in life. 

It hasn’t been until these past few years that I realized whatever impact crater I leave in my time here, it will most likely be one defined by words. I hope I can play a role in keeping my democracy alive and helping people to process the oddity of growing up in these strange and frenzied conditions. It’s rare that we ever pause to reflect on the seismic changes that we’re undergoing as a species, and much of my writing is rooted in the idea that we really ought to stop and grapple with what exactly it all means. 

With my words, I hope to one day change the way that people think. I hope I introduce ideas into the world that hadn’t been considered before. I hope to contextualize the wonderful oddity of being ants scrambling around on a space rock during the time of rockets and computers and artificial intelligence.

100 years from now, I hope I will have made at least a few peoples’ lists of the all-time greats. But I’m trying not to get my hopes too high, and I’m thankful for whatever impact I can have here. 

Do you have similarly ambitious goals for your writing? What do you hope to achieve?

Walter: My goals have gotten less ambitious as I’ve gotten older. These days, I write stories to my children and I am looking forward to reading those same stories to my grandchildren (preferably with my daughters in the room). Like you, I expect that words will define me. Now that I’ve spent decades writing articles, I see that I keep visiting and revisiting the same ideas.

I expect that although I won’t likely be remembered in the fullness of time, I will have made some contribution to what people think. Somebody invented the fork right? We don’t know who it was, but we use a fork every day. I aspire to be the writer equivalent of the person who invented the fork.

What are your top 3 tips for writing a successful Medium article. Also, give us an idea of your writing pet peeves. What is something that makes you instantly reject a submission?

Ben: My three biggest tips would be, simply: 

1. Use Grammarly (but sparingly)

2. Listen to your articles back verbally via Speechify

3. Love what you do and think enthusiastically about words and their relationship to one another.

There’s no piece I’ll reject more instantly than one that was plainly written by AI. An error within the title, too, will often leave me feeling reluctant to review a draft to begin with. In short, if you include a period in your title, or if you ignore the rules around title case, that often (and maybe a little unfairly) signals to me that you aren’t doing the bare minimum on your part. Review the submission guidelines from time to time, as they change. I also offer a helpful tutorial for beginning on Medium here, as there’s quite a lot to know, and some of it does take some getting used to.

The biggest shift I’ve noticed with what’s being accepted and what isn’t is, understandably, within the subject of politics. With so much being written on the election this season, curators have a challenging task in trying to select the best of the best. Standing out from the crowd won’t be easy. 

Entertainment has also taken a hit as a subject in recent months it seems. It’s rare that people will read a review and have their lives bettered as a result, and that life-bettering component is much of what the Boost program aims to see in articles. If it’s well-crafted and engaging, that may not be enough if there are no profoundly actionable takeaways or morals.

Does this mesh with your own recent experience as a Medium nominator?

Walter: I get what you’re saying about getting the format right. I always try to emphasize that writers should at least try to get the title, subtitle, and image right. Still, I get a lot of submissions with an image in portrait orientation rather than landscape orientation. Even if I sigh and read the submission, you don’t want to put your editor in that mindset.

Yes, for the most part I’m avoiding politics entirely on Medium. I save it for Substack. When I do write about political topics on Medium, I try to do so in a general sense. I don’t mention the names of candidates, instead I try to focus on the larger issues such as relationships, justice, and freeing yourself from a toxic mindset. I see Medium as a great place for evergreen content. The beauty is that even if that content doesn’t find an audience on Medium, you can always publish it elsewhere and have it still feel fresh.

The next big thing!

That’s it for today. Be sure to go and check out Ben’s Medium publication and, if you think you have something appropriate, submit!

Also, keep your eye on Ben’s work on Substack. I always enjoy watching writers experiment with a new platform. Ben’s doing a lot of fun stuff both with his posts and his notes, and I’m sure I’ll be incorporating many of his tactics into my own work.