Medium Help
How to Listen to Your Medium Stories Before You Publish Them
A helpful feature that’s hiding nearby as you draft
Many people love the feature on Medium that lets us listen to the stories of our favorite authors. I’ve also read lots of comments from people saying that they wish they could listen to their own stories while their work is still in Draft status.
As it turns out, you can listen to your drafts, but the way to do this isn’t obvious. There are a couple of ways that I know of, and here’s the fastest:
- Click the three dots between the Publish button and the notifications bell.
- Click on “Share draft link.”
- Copy the draft link to your clipboard.
- Open a new tab in your browser, and paste the draft link into that tab.
- Click the “Listen” button to listen to your story.
I like to listen in one tab while I edit the story in another tab. That way, when I hear any errors, I can easily fix them.
Another helpful tip is to refresh the tab where you’re listening if you want to replay your story to check your work again after making edits.
The only reason I know how to do this is that I happened to read Kaori Mitsui’s helpful instructions! Kaori’s method is a little different, but it also works really well and is the one I used for a long time until I figured out the trick with the draft link.
Check out Kaori’s post for a series of helpful screenshots — she deserves the reads for figuring this out and sharing it! :)
In short, to use Kaori’s method, when you’re drafting a story, you need to…
- Click the three dots between the Publish button and the notifications bell.
- Scroll down and click on “More Settings.”
- Click to open the Story Preview (you can do this from clicking the title of the article as it appears in a box in the center of the page).
- Click the “Listen” button on the preview page.
If you have another way of listening to your story before publishing it, please let me know! These are the methods I’ve found so far.
P.S. If you like to read and write about do-it-yourself projects of all kinds, from self-publishing to cooking to painting to paper crafting to home repair, please consider following The DIY Diaries, and let me know if you’d like to be added as a writer!
