Unlocking the Secrets of Medium With Boost Nominator Robin Wilding

More tips and tricks from the Medium/Substack writing community

Hello Friends!

Today I’d like to introduce you to Medium writer and Boost nominator

Robin Wilding

. She’s an editor for New Writers Welcome, which is an excellent starting point for anyone who is new to Medium.

What I most like about Robin is that she delights in wordplay. Some writers are at their best when they smash words to pieces and then put them back together in new and interesting ways. Lewis Carroll comes to mind, but the description also applies to Shakespeare. There’s a certain irreverence and joyous play that comes from treating letters and word fragments like they’re building blocks.

If there was some kind of a wordplay competition like Lego Masters, I wouldn’t want to compete against Robin. Particularly if the show was on cable television.

I think all that word arranging has made Robin very good at gathering insight from incomplete data. She’s excellent at lining up information in a way that reveals the kind of plausible conclusions that are too often lacking in the media. 

She’s very well established on Medium, and she’s branching out to Substack. Her newsletter is called

Wilding Out

. Let’s learn a little more about her.

Interview with Robin Wilding

Walter: What’s your ‘writer’s journey?’ When did you first realize that you had to tell stories, and how have you managed to follow that passion throughout the years?

Robin: First, thank you for that incredible introduction, you’re hired to write my CV and bio. Second, ‘Sup Walter peeps.

My ‘writer’s journey’ began when I went to school for Print Journalism. Based on the word print you can figure out that this wasn’t recently. The internet wasn’t ‘a thing’ back then; Facebook was still just for college kids. I decided that wasn’t enough wasted money and I got a second degree in poli sci. I wanted to be a globetrotting journalist, however I decided that at a time when print jobs were under the knife and even seasoned journalists were having a hard time finding employment. 

I was offered a job at a tech sales company with a Google vibe and took it. Shortly after I realized I hadn’t quelled my thirst for globetrotting so I quit and moved abroad. First to South Korea, then Mexico. While in Mexico I had a slump during the tourism down season, so I dusted off my degrees and applied for writing jobs. I got a job at a content mill, did that for 6 months, got tired of the pay and found my own clients. 

Fast forward a decade and a half and I found Medium. Having only written corporate-type content for over a decade I had to learn how to write for myself, and pick a niche. I’d been bingeing stand-up comedy like a humor addict over the pandy and decided to try out humor. It worked, I grew quickly and two years later now I’m writing comedy, and starting again on Substack after wanting more than just one platform. 

I’m also kicking myself in the caboose for not joining Substack earlier–this place is fanfuckingtastic.

Walter: Do you write full time? What are your ambitions for the future?

Robin: I do write full-time. I have my writing clients but I am trying to transition away from that, to writing for myself. That is my goal over the next year–to write only for myself. I’d also like to write a book in the future. If you’re wondering when that will be out, I’m guessing about 18 months after I decide what the heck the book will be about. 

Walter: You have a lot of great images in your articles. I’ve also seen you use drawings, or add captions into images. What programs do you use? Do you have any background in art?

Robin: I have zero background in art. Any digital artist who looks at my stick figure doodles would probably agree with my assessment. But I did spend a lot of time learning Photoshop back in the day and my stubborn ass wants to make that time well spent so I use it. Even though these days Canva and AI can do it all without knowing Photoshop. 

I do like my silly image creations and doodles though, there’s a shitty handmade-by-someone-clearly-not-an-artist look to them that people seem to like.

Walter: Tell us about your experiences as a Boost nominator. What is your publication looking for?

Robin: I was brought onto the boost nomination program to nominate new and unboosted writers. I’ve been helping new writers since I started on Medium, through the pub New Writers Welcome and my discord community (anyone can join, it’s free, and we only bite on Tuesdays). So the role was a natural fit for me, although I think Medium mainly brought me on to prove to people that new writers are boostalated all the time (and they are). 

NWW is welcoming to everybody, not just new writers. While people bring the skills they learned working with us to other pubs, many stay on to leverage our audience of over 25K. We publish a variety of topics, save for a few like crypto, side hustles, tech, religion, etc. You can see the full list of ‘aww hell naw’s’ here. 

Having said that, I do check every piece coming into the pub for its boostential, but I nominate a lot from outside the pub. I’m constantly trawling Medium looking for writers in the wild, since new writers often haven’t heard about NWW yet, or even the boost.

I also work with different non-boost publications to find exciting new writers. This strategy isn’t super effective for me though, since most of the pubs I work with end up becoming nomming pubs in 1-2 months. But when they become nommers they hit the ground running. 

Walter: What are the most common mistakes you see that discourage an article from getting Boosted?

Robin: As I sputtered on about above, I’m regularly out there crawling to the bowels of Medium looking for undiscovered writers. I pay close attention to posts about the boosts, looking for people who say they haven’t been boostified yet. When I see someone say they haven’t been boost blessed yet I go straight to their profile. 

Some simply haven’t been found yet (and often aren’t leveraging the boost publications). Others may fall into a number of categories:

1. Nothing Personal–its articles that could have been written by anybody and don’t involve their unique expertise and experiences. This is boost-critical. 

2. Not Highly Unique–far too many pieces are on topics that have been done to death. If 10,000 other people wrote on that topic before you, yours better be balls-to-the-wall phenomenal. Getting boosted for unique concepts and stories is much easier. But if you are tackling a common topic it needs highly unique insights and experiences. 

3. Too Fast–a good editor can tell when something was written quickly. While some quickly-written pieces do get boosted, in my experience this is more the exception than the rule. I can only speak for myself here, but the pieces of mine that get boosted–most of them, I’ve spent a couple of days (or more) working on. 

4. Not Written Well Enough–in the echelons of the boost, having coherent words on a page isn’t enough. Your words need to inspire, evoke emotion, teach a solid lesson, and/or entertain us. And they should be heavily edited to filter the fluff (kill the darlings). 

5. Patience–ok, this one isn’t fully boost related, but it encapsulates all of the above in a way. For me, the boost takes patience. Patience ruminating on the piece, then in writing, next in your own editing. After that you need to spend some time finding the right pub for that piece, then spend time editing through an editor. If you haven’t been boosted yet, trust me on this–it’s worth the wait! 

Writers also need patience because not every amazeballs story that gets the nommer nod will be boosted. Some of them get boost blue balled. Sorry to be the bad news bear here, but it’s part of the process. Even the people I know who get the boosticles a lot, still have pieces rejected regularly. But the more unfuckwithable pieces you craft and put into the ether–the higher your odds are. 

The big takeaway!

Thanks Robin!

I appreciate hearing from writers like

Robin Wilding

and

Ben Ulansey

because they always have a take on writing that’s similar but slightly different than my own. I think it’s useful to examine the areas where our perspectives are different, and sometimes that provides a huge amount of insight. Make sure to follow

Wilding Out

for great ideas and great writing!

That’s it for today, on to the next great thing!

Here’s last week’s interview with Ben in case you missed it:

(Note: I started laughing at the end of the audio because of all the goofy words Robin made me read)

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