Where Does Medium Fit In the Writing Marketplace?

Why I believe all writers MUST have a Medium account

Hello Everyone!

I’m finishing up a good week of work and I have a few exciting things to talk to you all about.

First, all 5 of my stories on Medium received a Boost last week (you can tell by the circle with the upward arrow):

I was really surprised by the response I got from the “useful writing advice” article. Sometimes I hit a nerve without realizing it. Here’s a friend link to that article so you can read it even if you don’t have a Medium account.

Remember, Boosts help, but your stories can earn well on Medium even if they aren’t Boosted. The difference is that with a Boost you see an uptick in views over 3-5 days. Without a Boost you get lower but steadier earnings over a month or so.

On Friday, I sat down for an interview with

Kristina God

which she’ll be sharing on her various platforms at a later date. My following on Substack has gone through the roof since I started following her newsletter, so I encourage all of you to go and sign up.

Speaking of that, I enabled subscriptions on my newsletter as well. I had quite a few people who had offered pledges, so I made sure to contact them all to let them know the charge was about to go through. I didn’t want anyone to be surprised by a pledge they made 6 months go.

I think 4 of the 5 pledges are still active (awesome). I was wondering how that was going to work because sometimes credit card companies flag new charges. I recently had a similar issue when I tried to purchase some plane tickets.

I guess we should be grateful for whatever protection we get from financial institutions, even if it can cause an inconvenience at times.

Thanks to all of you who have enabled a paid subscription. I appreciate the support!

In talking to Kristina, I realized how valuable it is to field questions. I think I learn as much from your questions as you learn from my answers. Your questions also provide me with feedback about which topics you find to be the most interesting, so please don’t hesitate to fire away:

Where does Medium fit in?

Stats from a Medium email

I’ve been writing long enough that I still remember stuffing submissions into envelopes and sending them off. Sometimes you’d wait 6 months for a rejection, sometimes it would be a year, sometimes you never heard back at all.

These days almost everything I write goes to either Medium or Substack. However, as recently as a year ago, I was using platforms like Submittable to find new markets. I used to supplement the income I earned on Medium by selling the occasional story or article elsewhere.

Pro tip: When a story gets rejected, publish it on Medium!

You need to figure out a way to earn something on everything that you write.

I also think it’s very important to write quality articles specifically for certain publications. Here’s the process you should use:

1. Find a great publication willing to pay $200+ for a story

2. Read their submission guidelines and craft a story to their specifications

3. Submit and wait (don’t resubmit until you hear back)

4. If the story is taken, cash the check (Yay!)

5. If the story is rejected, find another publication that pays well

6. Repeat this process until the story is sold or you’re sick of trying to sell it

7. When all else fails, publish it on Medium!

That’s right, when I first started out on Medium, the platform was for my “slush pile.” It was the place I sent stories that hadn’t sold elsewhere because I wanted to get a couple bucks out of them.

In fact, I just went through my email and did a search for “submission” to find a whole bunch of quality articles I’d completely forgotten I’d written.

Nice rejection letter

I find that when you sit down and challenge yourself to write something great for a quality publication, the article ends up doing very well on Medium.

Even on Medium, there are a few publications that I know have very high expectations. The Writing Cooperative is an excellent resource. I know that anything I submit to them has to be at a very high level.

It’s good to challenge yourself.

It’s good to think big and send your work off to high paying publications.

But don’t quit when you get a rejection. Those publications don’t get the last word on whether you get published or not. That story is YOURS! You can sell it elsewhere.

Build an audience naturally

The question is how much time you want to spend trying to “place” a quality article. For me, a good practice was to submit to one or two magazines, and then publish on Medium.

There have been times when I’ve developed good relationships with editors who looked forward to my submissions. The whole key to finding success as a writer is getting editors to trust you. If they are on the lookout for an article from you every single month, it makes their job easier, and you’ve just carved out a regular income for yourself.

The more time you spend on Medium, the more money you’ll make on that platform. However, there’s no need to go all in at once. Start by publishing the occasional story. If you only do two or three stories on Medium per month, you’ll slowly gain a following and start to see your earnings improve.

My guess is that most writers can do their own inbox search and find a couple dozen old articles that they’d forgotten about. Those articles aren’t doing you any good gathering dust in your inbox. Publish them on Medium.

You’ll gain followers.

You’ll gain claps.

You’ll gain subscribers.

Heck, you might even get boosted!

Just establish a presence on as many platforms as possible and good things will start to happen.

My CoSchedule referral link

One more thing I forgot to mention, a few weeks ago I wrote an article about the importance of titles. Since then CoSchedule, the headline analyzer tool I use, sent me a referral link. You can try it out for free (and ask me any questions), but if you decide to pay for a subscription you can support me by using this link (thank you!).

You can share the link if you want: coschedule.com/i/walter-rhein

I’ll be talking about titles more, they’re super important.

For paid subscribers

This section contains a link for paid subscribers to ask me writing related questions:

If you have a question for me, fill in this form. If your question is chosen I’ll include my answer along with a link to your Substack handle in my next newsletter.