How to Be a Glorious Failure on Medium
What one hundred articles have taught me about this platform.
Physicists say 99.999999% of the universe is empty space.
You, everyone you know, and everything you love could fit into a gap between the sofa cushions.
Compared to a stat like that, the amount of Medium articles written about Medium seems positively reasonable. Even if you include the articles written about writing more generally, the endless rehashed listicles promising success, the Stoic-quoting advertorials for the courses of nonentities, you might still find you’ve only covered about 90% of the platform.
Plenty of room for another, I say. Since this is my hundredth article on Medium, I’ve decided to write my first — and quite possibly last — article about the platform itself. If you can’t beat the self-referential Mobius strip, join it. Ouroboros or bust.
So here’s a few things I’ve learned by writing one hundred articles on Medium. And since there’s zero possibility of this article getting curated, strap yourselves in, because there’s gonna be some cussin’, y’all.
Why the fuck are you here?
Some people are here for the money. There aren’t too many platforms online where a complete amateur can sign up and start earning. And those that do exist, by and large, don’t pay as much as Medium does. Nothing wrong with that.
Other people see Medium as a way to promote their product. Maybe it’s the courses I gleefully mocked in my introduction. Maybe it’s their personal blog. Maybe it’s a book.
While Medium doesn’t publish visitor numbers, it’s probably north of 60 million unique visitors each month. Who could hope for an audience even one hundredth of that size on our shitty half-baked blogs?
Some write on Medium just to write. For the giddy thrill that comes from making something out of nothing and sharing it with the world. Writers who don’t have a product to sell and aren’t interested in chasing dollars.
If you’re waiting for me to say that one of these is purer or nobler than the others, keep waiting. I find myself falling into all three of the above categories, sometimes all at once. I’m not on Medium to make money — which is just as well, because I don’t. Still, I’m not about to turn it down.
But there’s a difference between writing to make money and making money by writing. If you’re just starting on this platform, you need to decide what matters most to you.
Certain topics, certain styles, certain voices do extraordinarily well here. Others don’t. If you’re here to make money, you need to emulate the success of the top writers. Like any other job, that means pleasing the audience rather than pleasing yourself.
Personally, I do enough of that in my day job. All day long, I write about topics I don’t care about. For money. I’m not interested in doing that here.
I am interested in being read. If I were to write solely for myself, I would be scrawling this down in a notebook in the garage the previous tenant converted into a drafty bedroom. But I’m not. I’m writing it for you to see.
What’s crucial is to know what your personal metric for success is. Is it money? Is it fans? Is it the honing of your craft? Is it more important to write something popular, or something that you love?
Few of us are lucky enough to do both. Deciding early on what you want from Medium can save you a lot of anguish later on.
Curation matters. Except when it doesn’t.
We all start off on Medium with zero followers. Some people make friends quick. Some bring a large following with them from somewhere else. Some, like me, start with nothing and stay there.
Without followers, getting a piece curated — in other words, selected by Medium’s editors for promotion in topics — can make a big difference to how many readers you get. For an unknown writer like me, the difference can be dramatic.
But curation is a wild and whirling beast, as unpredictable as a wounded wolverine on crystal meth. There are guidelines you need to follow if you hope to have a shot. But beyond that, no one knows what gets curated except the curators themselves.
The criteria can be extraordinarily fickle. I started writing on Medium seriously in October 2019. Between then and February, approximately 65% of the articles I published got curated.
After that, everything changed. In February and March, my curation rate dropped to around 13%. My articles were going nowhere. Almost every day, I told myself I would give up on Medium after the next article. If people don’t want to read what you write, how long do you keep banging on a locked door?
But for some reason, I kept going until March. In March, my curation rate suddenly soared to over 90%.
People who get curated often will tell you that it’s nothing but a measure of quality. Not only is that an extraordinarily smug thing to say, but it’s not true. Maybe I’m a better writer now than I was in February. Maybe not. But it’s hard to believe I became a dramatically worse writer for two months this year and then suddenly improved overnight.
The point of all this is not to complain about the curation process. Lots of people have done that far more intelligently and eloquently than me. And honestly, outside of February and March this year, it’s been pretty good to me.
The point I’m trying to make is that as a new writer, or even an experienced one, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that a lack of curation means a lack of quality. Even worse: don’t think that regular curation makes you a genius. Like anything else done by humans, curation is subjective. Sometimes you’re up. Sometimes you’re down. The gods sit silent on Olympus.
Engagement matters more than views
Because I’m a wildly unsuccessful writer on Medium, I can’t draw any wide-ranging conclusions from my own statistics. The majority of my articles get less than 100 reads. There’s only so much data you can infer from such a small set.
However, since joining the publication Illumination, I have found that I get far more attention and make far more money on articles there than anywhere else. Even an uncurated article on Illumination does better than a curated one on far bigger and more established publications.
That’s because Illumination is a community built on mutual support. People don’t just look at your articles. They read them and clap for them and respond to them. Both in financial and emotional terms, that’s far more important. Would you rather be vaguely known by 10,000 people or actively loved by a hundred?
This is not a place for good writing.
To be clear, I’m not saying there’s no good writing here. Check out this scathing takedown by Felicia C. Sullivan or this piece of gorgeousness by Henry Wismayer, and you’ll see that in among the self-promotional dreck, Medium still has the power to publish gems.
Actually, I’m not saying it at all. It’s Ev Williams, founder and CEO, that states in this comment that good writing is not the point of Medium. Instead, it’s a place to share knowledge. Beautiful writing is a lubricant, Williams states. It’s the atmosphere of the restaurant the taco (of knowledge) is served in.
These days, knowledge is cheap. It’s absolutely everywhere. If anything, we have too much of it. Too many wild opinions breaking down in decaying orbits, buzzing around our heads while the desiccated corpses of flash-frozen astronauts rattle. I don’t sit up late at night reading peer-reviewed scientific journals — not often, anyway. What keeps the lamp burning for me is fiction.
I’m with Nabokov on this one. In books, in writing, style is all that matters. It’s the white-hot meeting point of individual experience and the unique expression of that experience.
You and I could go together to the exact same ice cream store, order the same exact flavor from the same surly, hairy-chested owner, and follow the exact same route home, and still write about the experience in completely different ways.
The truth is, none of us have a secret line on the truth of the universe. None of us really know a fucking thing. All we have is our experiences and our opinions. The more people you meet, the more places you go, the more experiences you have, the more you realize that none of it is unique.
That time you lost a shoe in the fog of Machu Picchu? A guy from Gothenburg did exactly that two years earlier. The babysitter you fell wildly and hopelessly in love with as an eight-year-old that you met after a twenty-five-year absence in a used bookstore in Lombok and subsequently married? Yeah, my barber did that too.
It’s how you tell the story that matters most.
If you came to Medium to share your brilliant and original writing style, that’s cool. But be aware that you may not go very far with that attitude. I certainly haven’t.
You get back what you put in
You’ve heard this one before. But the truth is cliche. This infinitely splendid universe can sometimes be strangely unimaginative.
In this, Medium echoes life in general. It’s filled with fragile egos, cunning grifters, and raving lunatics. And just like with life in general, the results you get out of Medium are related to the effort you put in.
Hard work doesn’t guarantee success. Not here. And not in the world outside of these glassy digital walls. You can try and try and try and still fail. This platform is littered with the ghostly digital avatars of those who gave up, who found more productive ways to spend their time than hurling ignored words into the white space of the user interface.
Hard work does not guarantee success, here or anywhere else. But a lack of hard work guarantees failure.
And what does hard work look like on Medium? Writing and publishing articles, of course. But since I’ve already told you that it’s taken me nearly eight months to write one hundred articles on here, you know that I don’t publish something every day.
Some writers do more. Julia E Hubbel produces several articles every day. But I’m not as interesting as her. I haven’t lived the life she has. I don’t have as much to say. It takes me days to put something decent together. That’s okay. What kind of world would it be if we were all the same?
Hard work on Medium doesn’t just mean writing. It also means reading. Reading the writing of other people and commenting on their work. Support other writers, and they will support you.
At its best, Medium is a community. And it functions best when you treat it like one. This is not a place to be aloof, to try to cultivate a writerly mystique. Nobody’s falling for that shit here.
Don’t follow leaders
One of the most popular types of article on Medium is the how-to. Since people who write and publish articles every day don’t know anything as well as they know writing, many of these how-to articles are about how to write.
Some can be helpful. Some are not. Some I’ve stumbled across have been downright idiotic, or insulting, or almost criminally wrongheaded. But as long as people keep reading them, writers will keep writing them.
The glory of a platform like this is the multitude of different voices you can find. What works for the big names, the ones who make a full-time living on Medium, the ones who make tens of thousands of dollars every month, may not necessarily work for you.
After all, you’re not them. You didn’t join the platform when they did. You don’t have the background they have. You can’t expect the same results.
Perhaps even more sinister are the articles that tell you how to write, not just for success on Medium, but for good writing in general. Guess what? Nobody on earth knows how to write. Not one of us.
Shakespeare didn’t know how to write. The words just came out of him, and enough people responded to them that now we call him a genius. Drag his ghost out from under the floorboards in Stratford and quiz him on how he did it. All you’ll get is a shrug.
Success — the financial kind, anyway — and quality have never been the same thing. If you don’t believe that, I have two letters and a proper noun for you: EL James.
That’s not to say that you have to choose between being successful and being good. That would simply be the hipsterish fetishization of obscurity. I liked Shakespeare before he was cool.
But the most important thing I’ve learned from one hundred articles on Medium is that you need your own definition of success.
I write to keep my heart alive, as an antidote to the artificial and anodyne everyday. If I spent my days writing 7 Ways To Get More Followers On Medium, I would destroy the thing I love. Kill the bird, kill the song.
The meaning of success on Medium, for me, is writing work that I think is good, the kind of things I would want to read, and interacting with the handful of friends — because some of them have legitimately become my friends — who appreciate what I’m doing.
And without Medium, I might never have read the work of some gifted writers. Like Felicia C. Sullivan, one of the best prose stylists you’ll find on this platform. Like Kristi Keller, whose no-bullshit attitude is a welcome escape from writers who take themselves far too seriously and is leavened by her unwavering support for others. Writers like Marilyn Flower, who switches effortlessly from humor to poetry to the deepest spiritual themes like a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower.
There’s Steven Gambardella and his incredible knack of breaking down the densest philosophers into highly readable pieces that will change the way you look at the world. There’s Mike Alexander, a writer who uses his prodigious gifts to make you not only see the places he writes about in his flawless articles, but to feel what it’s like to be there.
Then there are the editors who volunteer their time to build communities here on Medium and help writers find an audience. Like Kristi, mentioned above, and her travel publication Writers On The Run. Like Dr Mehmet Yildiz, the mastermind behind Illumination, who is bringing synergy and synchronicity to Medium to create the best community on the platform. Like Dan Moore, whose judicious edits helped me to understand better how to write on Medium.
I didn’t come to Medium to make money. And I haven’t.
I came to be read. The stats may not be what I would like them to be — when are they ever? — but every day, somebody else finds my words and gets something from them.
When so much of the Internet is eaten up by swivel-eyed invective, shark-hearted marketing, and suspiciously youthful butts, Medium, for all its flaws, remains a place where you can discover something more meaningful. Where you can share a part of yourself with people who just may understand.
I’ll never be famous, here or anywhere else. I’ll never be widely read. But sometimes, I connect with things other people have written, or they connect with my work, and it becomes worth it. Those are the stars I steer my ship by. There’s no better place to find some stars of your own.
