I’m Looking for Anti-Racism Articles to Boost on Medium

The best process is to send me a draft so I can provide you with some feedback

Hello everyone!

I feel as if change is on the horizon again at Medium so I want to stay ahead of the game. My feeling is not because of any announcement, it’s just the sense I’m getting based on what’s getting boosted lately.

Until now, I’ve spent most of my time perusing recently published articles under the racism tag. For those of you who don’t know, you can find an archive of Medium posts based on subject by using this URL: https://medium.com/tag/racism/archive. You can swap “racism” for “thishappenedtome” or “culture” or any other of the 70+ official Medium tags. Those tags really are the key to navigating Medium. It’s one of the best ways to get your work seen both by readers and by members of Medium’s staff.

I know that Medium both wants and needs to expand further, and that’s part of the reason I launched this Substack. Bringing more quality writers into Medium helps me as a Boost nominator, and it helps me by keeping the platform healthy.

So, whether you’re on Medium already, or you’re curious about the platform, I want to hear from you. I nominate anti-racism articles, so if you have a story that needs to be told, please reach out to me and I’ll do my best to help connect you to an audience (walterrhein@gmail.com).

What Medium is looking for

I’ve discussed this before but for the purposes of this article I want to simplify the formula even more: Medium wants an expert opinion combined with a personal story.

That’s the line that’s easy to remember so you can repeat it to yourself like a mantra. Now, let me give you some more details.

When I first started nominating stories for a Boost, I failed miserably. I think I only had 1 story get accepted out of my first 5 or 6 nominations. I felt like I was going to wash out of the program and that scared me because, frankly, I needed the money.

Eventually, I focused on the “expert opinion” part of the formula. I went to the Medium search bar and typed in PhD. That brought me to a list of all the Medium authors who had PhD in their bios.

I went through this list and made a spreadsheet. Many of the writers with PhDs were no longer active on the platform. Many wrote outside of my area. But I went through the entire list and filled my spreadsheet with 100 or so names of qualified authors. Working mainly with that list, I managed to claw up to a 60% acceptance rate in my first month.

Once I got done with the PhDs, I did searches for other expert terms like “doctor” or “psychiatrist” or “master’s degree” and discovered a few more excellent but unheralded writers.

The point of this anecdote is that you should put your qualifications in your bio, and you should lean on your qualifications when you’re writing.

The story you are most known for

Everyone has the kind of story that turns a casual acquaintance into a fast friend. Everybody is a writer without even realizing it. There’s a story that you’ve told twenty or thirty or a hundred times. Each time you’ve told it, you’ve edited it and refined it and made it better. Today, you can tell that story on autopilot.

This is the story you tell at parties or at weddings or at bars or at a variety of other social engagements. Just because you did your editing through speech and not on a keyboard doesn’t mean that you’re not a writer. Your story is written, you just have to transpose it from a spoken story to a written story. Heck, record yourself telling the story and transcribe it!

These are the stories I want to hear, but I want you to think about them. Don’t type off the first thing that occurs to you. I can tell the difference between something somebody just made up and something that’s been told with precious care over and over. The latter has meat on the bones.

This is the essence of writing actually. I spend most of the time that I’m not sitting at a keyboard dredging up the forgotten traumas that form my nightmares. Sometimes your best stories are the ones you deliberately choose not to think about. However, when you extract them from the murky depths and clean them off, you strip them of their power.

It feels good.

The best process

If you have a good story, send it to me as a Google Drive document. That allows me to track the changes. Here’s a story on Track Changes if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

I should warn you, I can chop up a piece of writing pretty good when it’s sent to me for edits. Remember that Medium has a specific format in mind, and if you don’t conform to that format the chances of a Boost go right out the window. I don’t like having my nominations rejected, so I’d rather just get it right the first time.

Most of the time, the hardest edit you’ll get from me is the first thing you send. If you pay attention to my style guide, it will go a lot easier (but writers always think the rules apply to everyone else—I’m guilty of that too).

Once you have the story in good shape, I’ll add you as a writer to Cultured and we’ll polish off the last few formatting issues on the Medium portal. Medium allows editors to make corrections on drafts and leave notes, but it’s really not a very good interface for editing. I’ve been trying to send them some gentle suggestions to improve the platform, but they haven’t heard them yet (you always get better results when you make somebody think a suggestion for an improvement was their own idea).

Make sure you’re signed up for the partner program. That’s how you get paid and once you’re a member the partner program doesn’t cost you anything extra. Heck, even if you only make back half the cost of a subscription, it’s still worth it. I made that in my second month on the platform.

Cross-pollination between platforms

For the last year, I’ve only been dabbling with Substack to see how I can get this platform to work for me. Over the last month or so, I’ve been finding myself gravitating here a little more.

Medium is a great resource that allows you to get your work seen by a huge audience. I think most of the people following me here on Substack have come to me either directly through Medium or because they want to know more about Medium. It’s exciting to think that I might be at the point where I can start drawing writers from Substack and start to bring them to Medium.

As the Boost program continues to grow, there’s going to be more and more of a need to cultivate good writers. When I started as a Boost nominator, there were only about 40 of us. That meant that there were a lot of quality articles on the platform that hadn’t been discovered. Plus, we could go back 6 months to find hidden gems.

Today, I believe there are over 100 Boost nominators and the program has been active for almost a year. We’ve picked over the bones pretty good, so now we have to move towards more writer cultivation.

Again, I mainly work with anti-racism, social justice type articles, but if you feel strongly about a story please send me a pitch. Chances are, there’s a place for it on the platform. Remember, just because I edit your story and nominate it there’s no guarantee that it will be Boosted, but I have a pretty good success rate. If you give me 3 chances, I’m very confident at least one of them will get accepted (although I do lose writers when we’ve had 2 in a row and the third doesn’t land...sigh).

Anyway, mull it over and send me your thoughts! Also, subscribe to my Medium email if you haven’t already. That will provide you with good examples of the work I’m looking for, don’t hesitate to discuss those articles here on Substack.

Oh, if you happen to be in Chippewa Falls, WI, I’m giving a free presentation at the library tonight: