Fiction Friends, Issue #1 (Feb 21–27, 2022)
Promote your fiction on Medium here!
Hi, friends!
Welcome to the first edition of Fiction Friends, the publication where people can find fiction stories to read, and where anyone can promote their fiction stories.
There’s no submissions process, no applying to be a writer — it all happens in the comments section, and it’s open to everyone who publishes fiction on Medium.
This publication is brand new and it’s very much an experiment, but I hope this helps you connect with readers and find new fiction you’d like to read, too. 👏
Here’s how it works
- Choose a fiction story you have already published on Medium that you’d like to share, and then fill out the story form below. It doesn’t matter how old the story is. Make sure you include the link!
- Post your filled-out form in the comments section, and then take a scroll through the comments yourself and see if there’s another story (or two, or three) that catches your eye.
The form for sharing your story
Here it is, in all its elemental glory:
Title: self-explanatory. 😉 Read time: this should be based on Medium’s calculation (e.g. 3 min). Genre(s): include all applicable fiction genres here. Type: is it a short story, flash fiction, multi-part short fiction, or web novel? Etc. Status: is the story complete or ongoing? Rating/CW: indicate age appropriateness and/or content warnings here. There’s no specific system or rules for this; just use your judgment! Tags: e.g. slice of life, Cinderella retelling, robots, enemies to lovers, espionage, melancholy, silly humor, baking competition, end of the world, etc. These tags are intended to help describe the story and don’t have to match up with the story’s actual topic tags. Please limit tags to 10 or less. Link: be sure to include the link to your story!
This is optional, but you’re also welcome to finish your comment with a quick story description (“In a world…”), a short excerpt, or just a note giving people a little more info about the story.
Here’s a blank form, ready to copy and paste into the comments section:
Title: Read time: Genre(s): Type: Status: Rating/CW: Tags: Link:
A few ground rules
- Only promote one story per edition of Fiction Friends. You can promote a different story in next week’s issue.
- Don’t promote a singular story more than once per month — we don’t want people to be reading about the exact same story every week!
- Please only promote your own original fiction, and make sure your story complies with the Medium rules.
If you have questions about any of this, please feel free to leave me a note! 👍
Find reads // find readers
I decided to start this publication as an experiment because I was spending a lot of time searching for fiction that I wanted to read and writers I wanted to connect with — and I was usually coming up empty-handed.
The fiction community on Medium has so much potential, but it needs a little help. If only there was an easy way to scroll through active users’ fiction and see what kind of story it is at a glance! Well, fingers crossed that this publication offers a solution to that problem.
I hope other people will find this useful, too — and that one day, the Medium algorithm will render it obsolete!
But until then, I hope we can use this to find fiction on Medium that we’re excited to read —and writers and readers that we want to befriend.
Welcome to Fiction Friends. I’m excited to see your stories! ♥
E. Ardincaple is a fantasy and fairy tale writer. She is passionate about web fiction and is the creator of Fiction Friends, a publication for helping fiction writers connect with readers on Medium. When she’s not dreaming up a new story, you’ll find her lost in a painting, or a song, or a blue sky.
If you’re interested in getting a Medium membership and you’d like to support her work, consider signing up with her referral link at no extra cost to you. ♥
