92% of the Active Medium Writers Earned Less than $100 in December

…but you don’t have to be one of them in January

The December earnings report just came out. It’s not much different than the other months. In the history of the partner program, at least 90% of the active writers earned less than $100.

This must be really frustrating for 92% of the writers here.

But it doesn’t have to be you. Instead, let’s get you in the top 8% category. I mean, the top earner made $21 grand! That’s a large gap. I don’t earn anywhere near $21 grand a month here, but I do much better than a hundred bucks.

Medium is a vast, but growing platform. The only certainty you can count on here, is frequent change. The payment plan changes. The home page changes. The algorithm changes.

One thing that doesn’t change is the way you engage with readers.

Think of Medium as an intellectual candy store.

We don’t come here for breaking news. Medium is an escape. Knowing that, we’ve got to think more like readers when we write our stories.

Certain categories do better than others.

You can find the size of the categories as you add tags to your stories. The bigger the number of stories in a category, the more-popular it is. Not all categories earn the same either.

Some categories are very responsive, while others are not.

Here’s a list of the top authors.

Notice, the highest (as of this writing) is Gary V. Even he has only 300K followers (which, I know is a lot, but not a lot compared to his following elsewhere). Gary also stopped writing in 2018. This means Medium still has a lot of room to grow before it’s saturated.

If you work to build your following now, you’ll be well-positioned when those top-writers start hitting the millions of followers mark.

Medium is competitive now, but not as competitive as it will be in a couple years. Look how hard it is to start a YouTube channel, or become Instagram popular in the last couple years. The different between the haves and have-nots is huge on those platforms.

Not so with Medium.

While you may not make $21 grand a month, or even $21, there’s still plenty of room to grow.

Here’s an in-depth report on Medium author earnings from Casey Botticello (you can see the entire history of all the payouts here):

What does this mean for you?

Maybe you earned $40 last month. Maybe you earned less. I know how it feels when I write something that falls-flat, earning me pennies for my time.

But there are ways to earn more money with your stories.

It’s time we make our stories work harder for us.

We can do this by adding additional income streams to our work. You can use your stories to generate leads, sell more books, build excitement about an upcoming course, exhibit your professional expertise, or rally your tribe around a certain topic.

Instead of trying to squeeze a couple bucks from each story (short-term thinking), let’s take the long view and look at your body of work as a whole.

Your body of work:

Your body of work is the collective of everything you’ve written. Whether you focus on a particular niche, a group of people, a common theme, or whatever comes to mind — your body of work is cumulative.

I like to think of each story as a tiny interest payment.

The more stories I add to my body of work, the more potential I have for those little interest payments. While the potential for a single story to rock my bank account’s socks, is low, the cumulative power of the entire body of work is high.

Point is, we can do a lot better than $100 a month. All we have to do is make our writing work harder.

Medium stories can be fleeting and disposable, like long tweets, if we’re not careful.

Content enters the platform faster than many readers can consume it. If you want readers to choose your content, there are a few things you should do to keep yourself on the 8% side instead of the 92% side of the payment chart.

Five steps to becoming part of the 8%:

1. Choose a niche and nail it — These are the folks you want to serve. This is your tribe. Not every writer believes in this practice, but I do. I go after certain writers for certain content. I don’t want to seek you out for SEO help and find a poem. Or seek you out for a poem and find a cooking story.
2. When you choose a niche it’s easier to build a tribe — Tribes are an essential part of any writer’s business. These are the folks you’re meant to serve. These are the people you write for. Whether you write fiction or non, humor or serious — your tribe is the other half of your work. We aren’t writers without readers.
3. When you have a tribe, it’s easier to serve them for life — Service includes gobs of free, valuable content and the occasional paid offer. The paid stuff keeps the burritos in the fridge and the Bentley poster on the wall. The free stuff builds your tribe, maintains a relationship with readers and keeps them coming back for more.
4. The best way to maintain a profitable relationship with your tribe, without ads, is through email — Sure, you can pay through the face with social media, but we’re scrappy writers. We’ve got a powerful tool those Faceboogers don’t have — we’ve got Medium juice. Not only can you earn a little money from reads, but you can use the cumulative power of your writing to build something better.
5. Write consistently, no matter the daily results — You will have some lousy days. But, in aggregate, Medium rewards those who publish consistently and punished those who don’t. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have if you aren’t writing frequently. I write every day, but I like to publish every weekday on Medium. Most weekends I take off. But I didn’t do that when I first started. I didn’t want to lose the momentum.

Your email will set you free

If you really want to take a hard step over to the 8% side, you’ve got to add email to your writer’s arsenal.

Email is an insurance policy against algorithm changes.

Medium can make or break our partner program income at any moment, but you own your email list. Same with social followers — you can’t take them with you. Your email list is the only direct marketing, digital tool you own and control.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my $100 to disappear overnight.

Good news is I have a free email masterclass for you. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (or your next 1,000) without spending a penny on ads.

The masterclass is called the Tribe 1K.

Prior attendees include Nobel laureates and New York Time bestselling authors (well, maybe not the Nobel part).

Tap the link.

Join the 8%

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.