Medium doesn’t draw you for financial reasons and doesn’t pretend to, in fact, there are times you’ll wonder why you aren’t spending the time you spend at Medium writing for money elsewhere…
It was a fluke you were reading Medium. Perhaps your news app and a snippet of something interesting brought you here, one article leading to another. Identifying with Medium’s stories, writers, and information led you to check out the submission guidelines, where you can’t help but immediately get caught up in joining Medium (application is easy and pain-free). From there, you find your minutes disappear as you devour writer’s information, eager to attack.
Possibilities are limitless.
Writing is easy, everything is fair game. You can even import your earlier pieces so easily, you do just that. Before you know it, you’ve got four stories published and are calm enough now to focus on that One Article you’ve been meaning to write.
You write. You publish. You glance at your stats. Over and over you breeze through this process until you stop writing and… update your stats just one more time.
That first published piece, that masterpiece, don’t you know, generates a crazy amount of readers (don’t get me going on your fourth and fifth pieces and it’s lack of traffic). Those first thousand views cause a Super High.
This is The Life.
Settling into your new obsession, you stalk other writers with similar interests. You read, you ❤, you respond.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Except. Recognition is now s — — — l — — — o — — — w. You ramp up your activity, but end up without stats to prove it. You’re discouraged. You can quit or you can…
Stick with Medium at Least a Month
You’ll see a difference. It won’t be the difference you expected (a little bit of the one you expect, but not really).
A month and a few days into your Medium journey, you consciously appreciate good writing. At midnight, you’re scouring the site for information you can’t bear to live without.
You’re responding with good faith and even you believe what you say. You are getting into this because you believe in it.
And then it happens.
You Find Your Voice.
The difference is YOU.
Your stats, this time, represent you — the new, improved, and different you. They represent your growth in such a short time as a writer, an entertainer, an informer, an educator, or even as a persuader. You changed.
You were drawn to Medium. It draws you because you hope to have anyone reading (think validation) your work. It draws you because you have 100% control over what you write and when your deadline is. You are free to edit, re-edit, delete, and return your story back to publication. You’re drawn to Medium because it’s all you and because the audience appears built-in.
What keeps you on Medium is learning the audience is not built in and you must find, build, and keep your audience based on you and your work. Medium keeps you because you adapted and you did it all by yourself, consciously or not.
YOU DID IT. You did it. You did it!
You may have come to Medium as an uptight writer needing a break (if only people could see how well I write, how interesting I am, they’d flock to my every word). You may be heavily published and professional. You might be a new writer. It’s obsolete; the people who gave you a chance to recognize yourself and to upgrade your writing… that’s why you stayed.
An unexpected byproduct of writing for Medium is the connection built within the writing and reading communities. They are all at once wonderful, encouraging, crazy, just-like-you, totally different, and FAmazing. They keep you coming back almost as much as your incessant need to write. If you agree with this… please ❤ me and pass me around like the ❤ whore I am. Recognition in all its glory works for me.
