Announcement: I Have A Newsletter Helping Medium Writers!

And I want to share it with you ❤

I’ve been writing on Medium seriously since January. There have been a few writer’s blocks in between yet I have managed to survive. That’s because I love it here. That’s because I love to write.

Writing, which usually doesn’t garner as much buzz as other media like the latest Netflix Original, is arguably the greatest medium available at our disposal.

Reading makes you think. It forces you to use your imagination. It makes the reader a better person.

And for the writer…

It has forced me to learn more about myself than I ever had before. I’ve personally grown through my writing, and have had amazing and terrible moments while at it. Writing lets me express myself in words.

Without expressing myself, I wouldn’t know myself. I know myself more through my writing.

The Medium community is full of other great writers that I read from. And I believe we deserve more love.

The fact of the matter is that we bloggers are pressured to produce content consistently, yet it’s hard to do that when 1) we have to market our own work and 2) writing is an unpredictable revenue stream and we have other profitable (and unprofitable) responsibilities. This is not a criticism of Medium. Medium can only show you so much content in a day and as a reader I can only read so much in a day.

This pressure is more consequential than I thought. Instead of spending the time to make our pieces higher quality, we sometimes spend our time reading from random writers hopefully to get them as followers. I admit I did that once or twice when I first started in January. I immediately saw how unsustainable the strategy was. I couldn’t mix work with pleasure. When I read, it has to be interesting. I need to be engaged. But I can’t when I’m not doing it from the heart!

On Medium, there’s no real middle ground for this. Many of us either rely on Medium itself for finding content (curation, who we follow, publications, search, tags, etc.) or on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter (groups, publication accounts, etc.). But those platforms aren’t as curated as they can be. It’s hard for me to find gems in a noisy environment.

I want a more personalized approach for discovering more, good Medium articles — while helping great writers publicize their work. So I’m doing something about it.

Moving forward, I’m going to share my five favorite articles I’ve read on Medium every week in a free weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to below. And, of course, I’ll include one piece that I wrote myself.

Art Shouldn’t Be Isolated

Hopefully more writers use my newsletter as an example to make their own. I’m not trying to make “the biggest newsletter” or anything. Instead, I believe that newsletters like this will allow the opportunity for writers to make more genuine connections, which inevitably creates community.

I admit that I’m a romantic for the past. I look back at eras like 1920’s Paris and say “Hemingway, Picasso, and Fitzgerald in one place…oh my!”

Wouldn’t it be cool to have more 1920’s Paris-es, but online?

When artists collaborate, our art gets better.

I learn a lot on my own from both writing and learning from things that other writers do. For example, I learned that the reading experience of my pieces are better with personalized photography, and I picked that up from Anne Bonfert.

Admittedly, it takes a lot of work to learn, as I had to read many of Anne’s pieces to pick that up.

But learning is accelerated when it’s not in isolation.

Rather than only learning by reading pieces from Anne, I could’ve learned that if she had told me directly in conversation. Eventually she did, because we’re DM buddies.

And we need more Medium writers to be DM buddies!

Imagine how much better our writing will be if we spent less time promoting our work and more time sharing our work’s insights.

So that’s what this newsletter is for: to create a community of those writers.

If you’re a creative and want to discover great writing by Medium writers and meet them, sign up now!

Want to discover great writers on Medium? Subscribe to my free newsletter!

Want to connect with great writers on Medium? Sign up and introduce yourself on the Slack!