Writing | Publishing
A Few Things to Check As You Start Writing on Medium or Wherever šļø
Technical things guaranteed you did not read elsewhere
Going in order as things appear in stories on Medium.
First: Kicker
A kicker is quite an unknown writing aspect on Medium. At least it seems that way to me. The kicker goes before the title. In my story, the kicker is āWriting | Publishing.ā
Second: Title
Please no clickbait, God, please! I see clickbait every time I click home. I call those writers poachers. I am proud to say Iāve never been poached ā no poach bullet holes here.
To me, clickbait is anything that you know could be wrong or incorrect. For example: āWhat Everyone Misses When They Do Laundry.ā What if they are Amish? Just, donāt use those types of titles. I never click on stories like that. Another example is: ā7 Qualities All Women Like in Men.ā We all know that one of the qualities listed will be kindness. Kindness is not a gender-specific, or even age-specific, quality.
Title Punctuation
I check all my titles by and only by:
Subtitle
I guess you donāt need one all the time. I see the Medium Titans not give a rat's fourth point of contact about it. When you get famous enough, you donāt even need to read my story anymore, just have bad titles, no subtitles, no pictures, and copy/paste everything (or steal content from little Medium Pennies like me).
Picture
You can go to Pexels, Unsplash, and many other places to get a free image.
When I purchase from Shutterstock or AdobeStock, I always watermark it (you know, to be an asshole). Please, save the image. I encourage you. And use it. The Google views for Coach Lyon, LLC are down this month. Ha-ha!
Example:
Just get a free trial and get 10 free images.
To watermark my images, Coach Lyon, LLC has a gray transparent logo file to put over the image. A full-color logo file goes in a corner. Coach Lyon, LLC goes to the following website to put it all together beautifully:
Got to protect what you purchase. Letting people save paid-for images is lowering the value of the image. Comment below if you want Coach Lyon, LLC to watermark your paid-for images free. They will email you a beautiful watermarked image.
Under the image, make sure you list where you got it. Again, unless youāre a Medium Titan.
Content
To check my content grammar, I go to these places:
This next one I like because sometimes it gives me good rephrasing options.
This next one is the only one that gets the period before the quotation mark ( .ā ) correct.
https://quillbot.com/grammar-check
Another option you can do is to download Grammarly to your desktop (or Chrome, I forget where it downloads).
Caution
Again, watch out for poachers. Remember, there was a story of a guy who titled his story from how much money he made on Medium. I forgot the exact title. An example would be: āI Made 7 Million Dollars Writing on Medium.ā Then he wrote another article titled: āI Made 2 Million Dollars by Writing About How I Made 7 Million Dollars on Medium.ā
Single Lines
To use single lines, for poems and such, such as:
Single Line
Press shift+enter.
Bullets & Hyphens
With bullets, you have your regular,
- Bullet
You have your single-line bullet, - which stays a hyphen.
But, when you do a single line after a bullet,
- Bullet You can write here - Also, you can put a hyphen
- Then it goes right back to bullets.
Hyphens only work - On single-line options
With the exception
- To titles
And
- Subtitles
Publications
If you are not getting traction from Medium or other places, you may want to use publications to publish your work. I still do all the time. Iāve read titles of people saying they are quitting publications. Ha-ha! Itās just clickbait. Unless, of course, you have 5,000+ followers or 2,000+ email subscribers, then you might not need publications.
Conclusion
A lot of publications will want conclusions.
And that is all for the technicalities of writing on Medium.
Thank you for reading! Thank you for positive comments!! Thank you for being a good sport and sharing this!!!
