Find the Happy Ménage à trois Between Reading, Writing, and Your Medium Paycheck

There is a sweet-spot of a balance — don’t ignore it

A writer can not rise to his or her full potential without also being an avid reader. That’s a truism. Wouldn’t you agree?

It doesn’t matter that you don’t agree. It’s still a truism. If you are a writer who detests reading, there’s nothing to keep you from writing your heart out … but you won’t reach your full potential. And I couldn’t care less if I just violated a sacred tenet of logic, either. Everyone but you knows I’m right.

So let’s just proceed, dragging the non-believer behind us.

As important as reading is to an aspiring, or successful writer, I’m sure we all face the dilemma of finding that sweet-spot, that balance, between how much to read each day, and how much to write.

Stephen King claims to read eighty books a year, and most surveys report him as being the most prolific writer of all time. Eighty a year — that’s close to reading 7 books a month! He also shoots for writing 2,000 words a day, and we all know how hard that can be!

Other famous people … not writers so much, but big moneymakers, are also voracious readers. Elon Musk boasts of having read 2 books a day as a child; Mark Zuckerberg claims to read 2 books a week; Bill Gates, 50 books a year; Warren Buffet spends 80 percent of his day reading!

I think it’s safe to say that reading, in any of our varied capacities — that is, reading widely and deeply — is integral to our reaching our fullest potential.

But that isn’t what this article is about.

The reading/writing sweet spot for Medium writers

Medium writers (at least the ones I know) are an odd breed — and I say that lovingly, because I’m one of them. Most of us hardworking Mediumites speak of our platform as a side-hustle, while we are busy writing our novels, teaching on high school or college campuses, being a CEO, a nine-to-fiver, or a full-time parent. Some are retired, like me, living on Social Security.

Using Medium as a side-hustle, though, we are income gap-fillers. If you, dear reader (who is also a writer), are not a gap-filler — if you are well-heeled financially and are writing on the platform for other personal and well-defined reasons … I’m sorry if I’ve brought you eight paragraphs into an article that won’t be fruitful for you.

For the true side-hustling gap-fillers, I welcome you to read on — because you are doing, right now, what this article is all about: reading Medium “stories”. (I am using Medium’s definition of “story” as anything, nonfiction, fiction, photography, recipes, published on the platform.)

My credentials as a side-hustling gap-filler?

I’ve been a paid member of Medium since December of 2018. I came here to make a name for myself and earn a humongous paycheck. Of course, I failed in both. I had only one decent money-maker, back in 2020 (that I’m still being paid on today … forty cents this month!).

I discontinued writing on Medium for about 2 years, while still maintaining my active membership (which meant I was getting a dollar or two dumped into my checking account each month). I came back in September of 2023 where I basically started from scratch.

I haven’t broken the Stripe bank since my return. But I have been making steady progress toward my goal of earning a $1,000 monthly gap-filler Medium income to supplement my Social Security by year-end 2024. I think it’s a good goal, especially now that I receive periodic friendly gooses from my brand new Friend of Medium family!

Enough about me.

Let’s do this! Let’s take a look at the reading/writing ratio and the sweet spot for Medium side-hustlers.

Why you must read Medium stories to grow

My first couple of years with Medium was totally random and I worked without a plan. The experience of posting my first story was like sitting in my own little cave in the wilderness and reading it aloud. No one listened. No one cared. I posted my second, then my third. Then, a few Mediumites must have been jogging in the wilderness, and at just the right moment, they heard this odd thin voice speaking from the cave.

I did get a few responses, which buoyed up my confidence and I posted some more.

The point is that it hadn’t dawned on me then (and I don’t think it dawns on a lot of Medium newbies now), that you have to socialize to grow on Medium. For some of us shy, introverted types, that might send a shiver down our spines. But it brooks no opposition. To thrive you must socialize.

The ins and outs of socializing on Medium

Socializing on Medium means you accept that you are a member of a community. Winners, side-hustlers, gap-fillers, emerge from within the community.

You can only do that by engaging with your Medium family. You engage by reading your Medium brothers and sisters stories. The more you feel actual kinship, or at least commonality, within your family, the easier it will be. Reading to understand and making an effort to empathize with your Medium brothers and sisters should be your daily goal.

Thinking you can skip this stage is simply self-deception. Denying it only affirms that you choose to be alone — and on the outside.

The real questions then become:

1. How much socializing is enough?
2. How much socializing is too much?
3. And what is the sweet spot of balance between the two?

If we’re going to increase our “bottom line”, to use a business term (and if we receive an annual 1040, income tax form, from Stripe, buddy, we are a business!), we must take time out of our socializing to write, right? That should be so obvious as to elicit a huge LOL.

The newbie tends to wrestle with the first question until he/she truly begins to feel the kinship of family. Then it can be very easy to let socializing (reading, highlighting, responding) squeeze out the very important daily writing. Then we’re dealing with number two — too much socializing. And it can be a real problem, can’t it?

Finding the proper balance

You all know Jan Sebastian 🖐👩‍🦰. Back in September, I stumbled over her and fell in love. If you haven’t already, you’ll fall in love with her, too.

Now, Jan gets these cockamamie ideas — I mean cock-a-mam-eeeeee! — and then, somehow finds a way to make them work. Her latest was to read our stories for 14 hours straight. No writing, no TV … nada. 14 hours! If you can take away the cockamamie and dial it back a notch or twenty, you’ll be left with the essence of my thesis here.

Reading your Mediumite siblings’ stories here is important.

So is writing.

You have, locked within you, your own, direct and measurable correlation between how many Medium stories you should optimally engage in each day, and how often you should optimally post, that will determine how much money you make daily.

A whole lot of italicizing going on in that sentence. But if you read it again slowly, with the proper inflection, perhaps you’ll feel the importance I place in each italicized word or phrase.

But out of it there is this takeaway:

1. Your tally is personal, and you should record it daily. (Mine is below.);
2. On a separate log, not included here, I record (copy and paste) the name of each person I’ve read, with the date I read their last story beside it. That way I can see at a glance if, over time, I’d been slighting anyone. Valuable history is here.
3. Engagement is critical. It’s not “how many stories you read”, but “how many you thoroughly read.” I do not leave any story without clapping (50 for me), highlighting throughout — how can anyone not highlight? — and leaving a thoughtful comment. None of this, “Thanks for sharing.” “Good one!!! 👍❤️❤️”. The reader needs to know I read her story!
4. And a huge variable — how frequently you post. Some of you are comfortable posting daily, or once a week. That’s inconceivable for me. I write every morning, 2 1/2 hours. I’m finicky. This article will take two weeks to post. That’s me.
5. And the biggest biggy — what all of the above correlates with — your daily increase in Medium income.

We each need to find our own sweet spot, our own balancing act. If we want our income to increase with some regularity over time, we must treat our Medium platform as the business it is.

Too much time gossiping at the water cooler, our income suffers.

But if we spend all our time at our computer, our nose pressed to the screen, dumping in story after story — and not socializing — then our Medium family will start shunning us at the dinner table. That’s a promise.

It took me about two weeks before I found my sweet spot. Here it is, in my tally sheet below.

The first thing you noticed is that there are no real *WOW* moments charted here. No $100.00 days. Nothing like that.

January happened to be a whirlwind of a month. Six of my stories were published. But three of them had been hung up on editors’ desks for half of December. So posting dates can be deceptive.

Note the “timing” of the stories, as shown by the arrows, and that there is a natural lag between posting and it’s effect on the dollar increase:

1. Two stories posted on Jan. 1st. The effect was felt on Jan. 4th, with a $9.66 increase over the previous day.
2. On Jan. 7th, the “grammar” article published and was boosted. Note the $31.50 increase on the 10th! The effect of reader engagement was felt for the next two days. Here you’ll note something else …
3. For two days, I did very little reading. Instead, I was loving on my brothers and sisters for their engagement. Alas! it gobbles time. The effects of cutting way back on my reading were felt on the 13th and the 14th. Quite telling for me.
4. I took that wake-up call seriously. For two days I read more than 20 stories a day and committed not to let a day pass without reading my 20 stories.
5. Bottom line, my sweet spot turned out to be 20 stories a day. It’s doable, but for me, it is hard as hell! That is because I tend to be the male equivalent of a Chatty-Cathy. I enjoy the reader/writer engagement.
6. I learned that I must trim back my “story commentary” in order to make my sweet-spot of 20 stories a day more viable.

And that’s a wrap.

I hope, my brothers and sisters, that your time spent on my informal study was helpful. Work hard to enjoy your own Ménage à trois. Let me know if I can help. You’ll hardly know I’m there.

JS