Writers Can't Afford to Give Up On Rejected Articles

Medium offers a great way to immediately generate revenue on everything you write

The hardest part about being a writer is sitting around waiting for an editor to make up his or her mind about a story. I get a lot of emails like this:

“I really, really, really LOVED your story. It was probably the best thing I’ve read in six years and I was very tempted to pay you $3,000 for it. But then I thought about it and decided to publish something awful instead. Sorry :). But please keep banging your head against the wall! Toodles!”—Every editor

The punchline is that this email comes after you’ve been waiting for six months for a response. You see, many editors think it’s REALLY disrespectful for writers to send their work elsewhere while they are sitting around not reading your submission.

The most AWFUL thing in the world is that an editor would waste his time reading a story that has already been sold! How dare a writer do such a thing!

(Note, here’s a PRO tip. It always gets the attention of an editor to withdraw your story from consideration. “Whoops, sorry, this story has been sold!” If you do that a few times, the editors will start to remember your name.)

Anyway, the industry standard is for editors to act as if they own the manuscript from the moment you send it. Then they can take six years getting around to evaluating it and rejecting it. While the writer sits there starving in the streets for all they care.

This standard has been adopted, because it would be absolutely TERRIBLE to pressure editors to get through their slush piles fast so that writers can get an answer and move on to the next thing.

Oh, and I’ve worked as an editor. I absolutely LOVED receiving submissions and not reading them for years. Sometimes I’d write rejections like this.

“Just getting back to you on the article you submitted in 2015. It’s a really great piece! Truly, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read. It brought tears to my eyes! Unfortunately, your article related to an event that happened in 2016, and as it is now 2025, the article is no longer relevant. Too bad! When your articles are in response to current events, I’d suggest submitting them ten (10) years in advance to give editors an appropriate amount of time to evaluate them. Ha ha, I’m just laughing to myself because back in 2015 we used to pay in Bitcoin. Do you know what Bitcoin cost in 2015? It was around $400! Imagine! If I’d read your article then and paid you, you could retire now. All your financial problems would be over. Isn’t that funny? Anyway, toodles!”—Every editor… again

We all sign off with “toodles.”

Anyway, the result of all this is that writers end up with a lot of good writing that doesn’t end up immediately making it to the public. You have to learn how to make money on this writing. That’s imperative! You need to generate the mindset that you’ll make some amount of money on everything that you write. Even if it’s just a dollar, that’s fine! Those dollars add up. What doesn’t add up is NOTHING!

This is why I believe getting established on Medium should be the cornerstone for any writer (sign up with my referral link here). Medium is essentially a blogging/social media platform that allows you to monetize your work. The advantage of Medium is that you have much greater control over WHEN something is published.

There are publications within Medium that require writers to go through a submission process. However, Medium is much more of a writer driven platform. Most of the publications try to get through all submissions in a timely matter. In my experience, the human editors give your work a quick scan to make sure you’re not some lunatic trying to slip in a fascist manifesto (you know... the type of thing that you see on almost every other social media site). Then they hit publish, and you get the benefit of greater visibility.

In the old days, my ability to make money on my writing was dependent on getting stories and articles accepted by an editor somewhere. I had the greatest success when I developed good working relationships with editors. I made their jobs easier by providing quality content, they made my life easier by providing me with a stable source of income.

I still periodically send articles out to various markets because those markets tend to pay more. That being said, my top performing articles on medium can end up bringing in around $1,000 over their lifetime.

I place a lot of articles, but there are days when I wake up and read something in the news that requires an immediate response. Medium allows me to comment on current events and see the article in print within minutes of writing it. These are the cases where the delay from sending an article into a more traditional publication might permanently separate you from any chance of making money.

When I first started with Medium, I was able to get a lot of good content simply by going through my email and searching for “submission” in the subject line. I’m not the best records keeper in the world. There were a lot of good articles that I hadn’t placed and had completely forgotten about.

These days my process is different. I usually write 7-10 articles for Medium per week. On top of that, I’ll write a few more things to submit to traditional publishers. I have to admit that sometimes I only write for Medium, and I think that’s a mistake. You’re better off doing at least one “lottery ticket” type submission for a publication that has a better pay rate. The kicker is that if the article is accepted, you can include your Medium link in your bio and, hopefully, drive more traffic to your Medium profile (the money from those referral links adds up).

With the exception of Stephen King and a few others, almost no working writer places absolutely everything s/he writes. The advantage of Medium is that it offers writers the peace of mind that they’ll be able to monetize all their work.

That makes you more fixated on writing and less fixated on looking for markets.

Sometimes you put a story on Medium and it doesn’t perform well, other times it goes through the roof. These days, I have enough of a following that I’m guaranteed to make something off of everything I write.

Writers can’t afford to fret about finding a market every time inspiration hits. You’re much better off writing the story and then finding a place for it. If you think, “Hey! This might be a great fit for HuffPost, then send it.” If they don’t take it, then put it up on Medium.

Your writing must never be a one shot deal. Not everybody is going to like everything you write (remember, there are people out there who dislike bacon, chocolate, and ice cream). The trick is to get your writing into a distribution mechanism that drives some pennies to you.

You can think of Medium as your publishing slush platform. I do find that work that’s specifically written for Medium tends to perform better, but it’s great to have the option of immediately getting your work on a platform that has the potential to earn a decent return.

Again, if you’re not signed up already... just do it.