Why the Writing Life Requires You to Keep Calm and Stay Empowered
Evaluating how my work performed on Medium last week
Hello Friends!
We’re down to our final week (plus one day) of the election. Let it be done soon! In times like these, when we’re all living through enormous uncertainty, it’s especially important to take joy in the time you spend with your family and friends.
This weekend I took my family to an apple orchard. It’s kind of a local tradition. You pick some apples, go on a tractor ride, and navigate a corn maze. I might have to do a whole article about it because it happened to be a haunted corn maze and it kind of freaked me out.
Clowns… lots of clowns.
I’ll leave it at that for the moment.
Last Monday I mentioned that I had some pretty good articles sitting in draft on Medium. I wanted to let you know how they were received, and how the response is going to affect my writing strategy going forward.
Medium is different now than it was even six months ago, but I still think it’s the best place to get a nice return on an article. The platform challenges you to provide quality work that fits a certain format. I don’t always meet that challenge, but when I write something with the intention of earning a Boost, the work always does well when I repost it elsewhere.
I’m up to 155 Boosted stories, and you can scroll through the list here. A few months ago I was getting as many as 15 boosts a month. I believe I’m at 6 for this month, and I’m quite satisfied with that. The simple fact is that the election is throwing everything out of whack right now. If you’re frustrated on Medium, Substack, or any other platform, just remind yourself that things will get back to a new kind of normal in a week (plus one day).
Last Week’s Articles
I wrote an article about working for an Expat magazine in Lima, Peru back around 2007. This was one of my submissions for my weekly column on The Writing Cooperative.
I actually submitted this article about 3 weeks ago. I’ve been doing this column for about 3 years, and Justin almost always gets back to me within a week. I don’t have an insider view for The Writing Cooperative because I’m not an editor there, but he must get hundreds of submissions. I know that if I get my submission in by Sunday, he usually has it scheduled for Monday. But this one got passed over twice. In a way, that was almost a relief because it was like a mini vacation.
I felt really good about this article from a Boost perspective. It’s a personal narrative and it has “earthquake” in the title so I knew that would be unique. It wasn’t Boosted in draft, so I used one of my two personal nominations on it and it got in. It has performed well.
How an Earthquake Demonstrated That All Editors Are Accountable to a Higher Authority
This one is a good example of the combination of unique experience, personal narrative, and useful takeaway that Medium is looking for. If you model your own submissions off this one, you’ll be successful.
Article #2
I got inspired one morning and wrote an account about a time my family was harassed by a strange vehicle while we were driving back home from California. This one was nominated for a Boost, but it didn’t get one.
You can see from the stats that the story has a high read ratio. This will be a fun one to transplant over to Substack in the next few weeks. The story lends itself to the narration.
It could be that the curators didn’t like my illustration, although I think images like that stand out both as thumbnails and as featured images. I’ve been doing my little drawings long enough that I suspect my readers notice them in the feed and I get more clicks because of that recognition (we need all the help we can get).
My other suspicion about this story was that it might have lacked that “impactful takeaway” that Medium likes. It’s really more like a little Alfred Hitchcock vignette. Maybe it was a missed opportunity and I should have sat on it one more day.
How Highway Games Can Evolve into Road Rage and Put Your Family in Danger
I’ll rethink it when I move it to another platform and maybe I’ll make it a little better.
Article #3
I have to thank
and others for this one! Last week, my wife submitted her last paper for her Master’s degree. I posted a little note on Substack:I received such a nice response from this little note that I decided to expand it into a full article. Kristina always says that Medium and Substack go together like peanut butter and jelly and I think this is a good example of that. Sometimes you get a surge of inspiration from writing a note, and if you can see how to expand that note into an article, you should do it!
In fact, if you read my note and then you go and read the article, you’ll see how my note served as a sort of outline for the more developed treatment of the concept.
We Must Empower Compassionate Voices to Advocate for People in Need
Also, here’s how that headline scored in case you’re curious about that:
Again, I don’t use tools to generate headlines, but I think it’s valuable to run your headlines through an analyzer to get some feedback.
I’m pleased with the week
Sure, I’d like to have a week where one or more of my articles trend and they make me upwards of a thousand dollars, but the truth is that’s infrequent. A week like the one I’ve mentioned here is the bread and butter of writing. It features good, solid earnings.
Lately there’s been some weirdness going on with the trending list on Medium, but I’m starting to see more familiar faces circle back onto the list. I expect that means Medium has it figured out and some of the strange articles that have been featured there will no longer appear.
With writing, you always have to be diligent about gathering a wide selection of data points. Yes, I’m the same as any other writer and I get frustrated if one of my stories doesn’t perform well. But you always have to take a step back from that frustration and see how it fits in with the larger picture.
New Tier
I did this one just for fun. I’ve been noticing how fed up people are with newspapers owned by billionaires that seem indifferent to publishing anything other than propaganda. If you cancel your subscription to a newspaper that refuses to endorse Harris, consider supporting my newsletter! I need the money more than the billionaires do :) This is a 50% off forever coupon.
And the last bit of good news is that I hit 100k views for the first time. Thanks everyone!
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Thanks for reading! As always, leave your questions or comments below!
My CoSchedule referral link
Here’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).