How I Plan to Get Medium to Buy Me a Summer Cottage

Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.

I won’t give you all my personal financial details or anything, but I’ve always wanted to buy a little getaway cottage for my family. I’m not a wealthy person by any means, but a cottage has been on my bucket list since I was a boy.

Instead of spending most of my Medium income I’m saving it in a special ‘cottage fund.’ If the world goes to hell, I can always use it for food and grenades. But until then, the money is slated for this tiny place — yet to exist.

Medium is a growing platform.

I hope it grows a lot more. Since readers are harder to come-by than picture snappers, or listeners, we need every reader we can muster.

In order to prevent myself from losing my mind, I needed to aim my daily writing towards an important landmark (my alpha). Money is never the goal. Sure, a cottage might seem materialistic. I won’t apologize for that. But what I’m working-towards isn’t money — it’s experience.

In the era of work and live from anywhere, I’m a homebody. I want roots. I want a place where my family can bake memories into the walls. And I’m using Medium to get me there.

You can earn a great second income from Medium too.

Boost your Medium earnings faster

1. Write stories people want to read. Look at what’s trending. Look at your own stats. What got curated? What didn’t? What got accepted and rejected from publishers? We want more of what we want more of. Give us less of what we don’t.
2. Improve your craft every day. Readers will return to you for your writing voice and your topic choice. We want to be entertained and informed, simultaneously. This is called infotainment. The highest-paid people are entertainers, not teachers. Sad or not isn’t the point. Your readers will pay attention to you if you both entertain and teach. Not just one.
3. Write every day. You need serious momentum and volume if you want to earn great income every month on Medium. There are no days off. If you want to take a day off, you should schedule stories to get published those days. Too much time off leads to slumps in traffic. Big time. You’re competing against all the other writers here. I don’t want them to take my cottage.
4. Become a pain-reliever. This is a big one. We can always put your poem aside until later. We can learn about your book review or your latest opinion of the president tomorrow. But if you’ve got a cure for a pain I have — you bet your bippy, Skippy — I’m clicking. Pain relief can come in many forms. What keeps your tribe awake at night? Write more of that.
5. Be kind to yourself. I write total duds at least seven times a week. Luckily, I also have a couple winners sprinkled in there. If I got sad on myself every time I published a dud story, I would’ve quit 600 stories ago. Medium is the long-game. I can see that cottage in my mind every time I type here. There’s no time to feel bad. I want to smell the pine needles.

The Medium income isn’t the goal

I’m building my own publishing business. As indie writers and creators we’ve all got small publishing businesses. Even if it’s a business of one. When you’re head writer and bottle-scrubber you’ve got yourself a business.

But the Medium money isn’t the end-game.

I see the writing royalties as extra earnings (hence, the cottage idea). And I don't say this to be a snot. There are people here making a killing on Medium (much more than me). It’s there full-time gig and more power to them. For the rest of us, the real income belongs to your tribe. These are the folks you are meant to serve in an environment you control.

We’re talking about your email list.

Email automates the sales process. This takes some of the pressure off our cherished writing time. Once we set it up, email does much of the heavy-lifting of income generation, while we sleep.

If you want to build your own tribe, I’ve created an email masterclass to help you get your first 1,000 readers (or your next 1,000) without spending a sour penny on ads.

Tap the link. Today is the best time to start. Before you’re ready. Before the work is finished.

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.