Don’t Know Where to Publish on Medium? Try This

Save yourself hours of publication research

I love to explore different topics in writing. Mostly because I’m somewhat new to this ballgame and love discovering fun new things to write (and learn) about!

When I venture into these new areas and write up the next Shakespearean work on Chewbacca’s obsession with lustrous hair, I immediately struggle with ‘the publication question’.

Do I self-publish?

Do I go for one of the big publications?

Is it good enough for a Medium owned one?

What publications are popular on this topic?

What am I doing with my life?!! Oh god…

I’m sure many of us Mediumites have the same questions (well, maybe not the last one). So, I’ve done a tonne of research on Medium publications over the last 4 months, and here’s some easy ways for you to save hours of time!

Tip #1: Find your topic

When exploring new publications or a new writing niche, one of the first things I do is go to this article:

Go directly to the section that shows the 73 Top Writer tags on Medium.

Look through the list and find one or two tags applying to your freshly minted piece.

Let’s take ‘Business’ and ‘Leadership’ as examples.

I’m now armed with 2 things:

1. The chance to get Top Writer status for those two tags
2. A specific tag to find an applicable publication

Tip #2: Use the Lists

I’ve spent way too many hours curating publication lists on Medium, simply because I couldn’t find a better alternative out there. I also decided to share them because it’ll help save other people's time.

Here’s the most recent big daddy list:

And here’s an example of a genre niche list (I post all of these in Feedium — my Medium publication):

Go to either one of those listicles, read the short table of contents, and then look through them to find a few publications that suit your new article.

And again, we’re here to save you time right? Each of those lists shows applicable tags, submission instructions, links, and contacts!

Tip #3: Use the tags

If tip #2 didn’t satisfy your prestigious publication palate, there’s another quick trick that can help you find your perfect partner pub.

Assuming you don’t have the memory of a shiny goldfish and can remember the 2 tags you selected in Tip #1, we need to use those again.

Here’s my example ones again:

• Business
• Leadership

Those pretty little tags are also links, and they take you to the Top Writer page.

There’re two big benefits here:

1. We can see the most popular articles on Medium in the tag you chose
2. We can see what publications helped make those articles so popular!

Here’s #1, #2, and #3 for Business:

There’s many more in there, but you get the idea. (I also hope you enjoyed my pro highlighting skills on the touchpad.)

Tip 4: Top Writers

Click to that ‘Top writers’ section on the same page, as above.

You’ll now see up to 50 of the Top Writer articles within that tag.

Note: A few tags still don’t have 50 of them — AKA easier to get into if you start publishing in that genre.

Not only can you now see the most popular stories and where they’re published, but you can see the most prodigious Medium authors in these subjects too.

If you go through a few of those Top Writers you can find out what works for them, where they publish, and maybe even find a new favorite writer or two!

Wrap Up

Use all these tips to jot down potential publications for your newly crafted article. Decide what strategy you want to take, difficulty level, and how long you want to wait for editor feedback — then follow the submission instructions and wait!

To do all of the above takes less than 5 minutes — unless you get stuck in a rabbit hole of reading the Top Writers —so tread carefully!

If you’re having trouble with publication strategies in general, I do offer some advice in that mamma mia list above as well, just scroll to the last section.

I’ve made a bunch of similar niche lists already and have many more in the pipeline, so please be sure to follow Feedium or J.J. Pryor to get the newest ones as they come out!

Thanks and pleasant publishing!

J.J. Pryor

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