How to Make Medium Publications Work for You

An easy guide to get more views on your work

As a beginner or even as a seasoned writer, there are quite a few things to learn when you use Medium to publish your work. Medium, as a community platform for writers of various fields and topics, is offering you what no blogging space can offer from the get-go: views, reads and a community around you.

One of the most difficult tasks, when it comes to writing and publishing your work is that you need to get readers, and if you want to shift your traction to the next level, you need to move past the circle of your friends and family. Any self-managed blog is difficult to start, for you need a substantial body of work to get eyes and you need a lot of effort to obtain high enough SEO ranking and a significant amount of visitors that will at some point allow you to monetise your work.

Medium, on the other hand, is a platform where you already have it all, the readers, the great SEO, the ways to get more views on your pieces.

Naturally, you need to provide good quality consistently, you need to show up regularly, and you need to know what you stand for to find the topics that work both for you and your readers.

The curation system is Medium’s own way to elevate your work and to assure extra distribution, based on the topics they choose for your article to appear in and based on the traction you get through your readers' engagement (as in according to the algorithm, the number of claps contributes to further distribution, allowing you to get even more traction).

Publications are a great way to offer you more views and reads, without any further effort from your side.

What Is a Publication?

Publications are shared spaces for stories written around a common theme or topic, usually by multiple authors. They’re very easy to create and manage and they offer a wide range of features that you don’t get as an individual author.

There are quite a few different types of publications that you can use to boost your views, all contributing to your metrics in their own ways.

Self-Managed Publications

Each Medium writer can create up to seven publications on their own. It’s very easy to do and Medium offers a very simple description of how to do it, or you can find a whole lot of articles that will guide you through it.

The two main benefits for having a publication for your work are:

1. You can organise and manage your articles of different themes and you can better attract the right audience for your topics. For example, if you write both business and poetry, you might have two very separate audiences for each. Creating a publication for your poetry and your business writing respectively will allow your followers to find the relevant content easier.
2. You can get in contact with the followers of your publication through the letter function. As an individual author, there is no way to get the attention of your followers in bulk, as Medium doesn’t facilitate it — to avoid us spamming others. With the publication letters, you can get in touch with people who follow your publication and your work that is usually centred around a specific theme. It can grant you more visibility and an opportunity to communicate with your fans.

As an owner, you can keep your publication to yourself, meaning that it will contain only work from you.

But you can also add other authors as editors or writers. An editor will have the right to edit other contributors’ work, will have access to the publication stats, and will be able to publish it with or without editing. A writer is a contributor who can submit their work to the publication, waiting for the editor or owner to publish.

There is a trend in having co-edited publications, where each author becomes an editor and they can publish their work. An example of this is The Partnered Pen or The Dream Verse.

It assures bigger coverage, for the followers of each writer can add up and create a larger follower base.

Regular Publications

Most of the existing publications on Medium started as self-managed publications when a couple of friends teamed up and created a shared space for their work and then started to accept submissions from other writers.

They usually have very specific themes that they accept submissions in, and they outline it in their submission guidelines. Most of them accept unpublished drafts only, but there are some that will take an already published piece as well.

You can find the list of the biggest publications on Smedian. There are over ten thousand publications that accept submissions and it’s easy to get lost in the ocean of opportunities. Most writers I know have a couple of go-to publications where they are writers and that match their general topics.

Why should you write for a regular publication?

1. They have a lot more followers than you can have, except if you’re already a top writer with 50k followers. But even if you’re a very established writer, you still need some help every now and then. The Startup has over 560k followers, Mission.org has almost 540k, and Personal Growth with 455k will certainly trump the number of your followers.
2. A lot of the publications send out weekly digest letters that might include your work, getting it to the inboxes of thousands and thousands of followers.
3. They sometimes work with editors who will correct your mistakes and even make minor changes to your work, improving it.
4. If you’re really serious about it, you can even become a regular writer with them or even have a column with them that gets even more traction.
5. They grow more quickly than you as an individual, therefore capitalising on their increasing followers will help you boost your own follower base too. One of my favourite pubs is Sexography, with 10k followers reached in only ten months.

If you’re consistently delivering high-quality work, it’s possible that publications reach out to you to have your article published with them. No matter how big they might get, they’re always on the lookout for good writers that would match their theme. For example, I’m publishing with The Startup regularly, because they reach out and ask for my pieces to be submitted with them.

Note: Even if you publish with a publication, you own the rights to your work. This means that at any point, you’re allowed to remove it or delete it. But it’s only decent to let the publication know about this, before doing it, to keep the good relationship up. Just so you know, the publication owner will receive an email when you remove a story, so don’t try to get sneaky about it. They’ll understand and appreciate the honesty and decency.

Medium Partnered Publications

There are a handful of publications that have partnered up with Medium, and in exchange for delivering a defined number of views, they have the ability to curate the submitted articles within their editorial team.

It’s as if Medium was outsourcing its curation capabilities to publications that consistently deliver great content, engage with great writers, and get outstanding views.

It means that when you submit your article to them they have the ability to curate your piece in different topics. They have the right, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll curate everything.

The way it usually shows up is:

• either you get a “Not distributed in topics” sign on your article and then it gets curated in several topics;
• or it gets curated immediately upon publishing.

As far as I understand the difference in the above two practices comes from the task distribution within their editorial team, whether the person who accepts and publishes your work is the person who is in charge of curation too or not.

The advantages for publishing with a Medium Partnered Publication:

1. Just because they can curate articles doesn’t mean that they’ll take everything that is submitted to them. Make sure that you submit articles of the right topic and that it has the right quality. They’re just as strict as Medium curators, but once you get to know the editors you might get on a fast track with them.
2. Getting curated is an obvious benefit, but you can also get curated or featured in several tags. Medium curators are not always too generous with the curation tags, it’s quite rare to get double, triple, or quadruple curation these days. The partnered pubs are more generous, and it’s possible to get curated in more than one tag to assure the views. Curation means that your article will be shown in the selected topics while featuring means that it’ll be shown on the top of the selected topic, at least until something else doesn't get featured in the same one. They all grant you extra views and reads and potentially more followers too.
3. The curation usually works quicker, even when the Medium curator team is lagging behind curation, it is safe to assume that the publication will keep its regular publishing and curation schedule.
4. For these publications to also live off the views they can generate, there’s usually a nice pool of accomplished and established writers. They might have columns or they might have a lot of articles with the pub. The bigger writers’ names are attracting more eyes and beyond being in good company (because how cool is that to have an article next to Kris Gage or Tim Denning) you can also get some from their traction.

Note: Medium related articles don’t get curated usually — not even with the partnered pubs. Which is fair enough that you cannot get distribution and make incredible amounts of money on Medium writing about Medium.

The Medium Partnered Publications you should totally check out and become a writer with:

• Mind Cafe: This is my new favourite one, the editor is amazing and their chosen theme is close to my own topic, personal development in an honest and relaxed way. Amazing columnists and really great topics. Their turnaround time is very quick and they do copy edits too, which is brilliant. Check out here how you can write for them.
• P.S. I Love You: This was the first-ever publication I started to follow on Medium and it never disappoints. The editors are really great writers and great members of the writing community. And their columnists are really great too! If you have anything to say about relationships, go to P.S. I Love You. Check out here how.
• The Better Publications: Better Humans, Better Marketing, Better Programming are all part of the same family. Depending on which topic you’re really into, whether it’s self-improvement and coaching, marketing or programming, these pubs are great. The editorial team is great, they’re quick and flexible. They use copy editors to improve your work. And Better Humans even pay a flat fee for your articles (it’s tough to get in there, but it’s worth it).
• Towards Data Science: A publication about technology, artificial intelligence, data and programming. They embrace a broad view, that’s why I wrote for them about empathy — without an actual technical background. They’re great and if you write for them regularly, their turnaround is really good too. Here’s how you can write for them.
• I’m sure there are others, but these are what I know about. Let me know if I left something out.

Medium In-House Publications

And finally, there are the Medium owned publications, the ones that you can see at the top of the homepage.

It’s a great honour to get into them because they’re not blogging surfaces, but they provide authentic journalistic content. If you can get into any of the Medium owned publication, it’s really great for you.

What are the benefits?

• Apart from the obvious, that you get curated or even featured, you might be paid for your article. It’s possible that you don’t get paid, but usually, they offer either a flat fee or a guaranteed payment.
• They’ll distribute your work more widely, as they have the means to this. This will most likely mean higher than average views and reads.
• You’ll have the chance to work with an editor to improve your work, which is great learning for everyone.
• It’s a great honour to get published with them and you can easily use them in your bylines.

Note: Being published with a Medium owned publication is no guarantee of success. It might or might not go viral, but you have a chance to get a breakthrough.

How can you get in there?

• They have submission guidelines just like any other publication and you need to meet a bunch of criteria to be able to get in there.
• Usually, you need to pitch a draft article or even an idea to them that they take or reject.
• Some of them accept already published articles, so if you think that any of your older articles could be a good fit, don’t hesitate to send it to them.
• They also look for articles and will reach out to you in case something intrigues them. It sounds like an urban legend, but I know a few people who had their articles published with Medium pubs.

What are these pubs?

It’s easy to know which are the Medium pubs as they are on the homepage and their URL is different. It is always showing up as a subdomain, for example:

onezero.medium.com or level.medium.com

See, the name of the publication doesn’t appear after the medium.com, but before it. This is how you can spot it.

• OneZero is the tech and science pub of Medium. Pitch them at [email protected].
• Elemental is the Medium pub for science-backed health and wellness coverage. Pitch them at [email protected].
• GEN is a Medium publication about politics, power, and culture. Pitch them at [email protected].
• ZORA is a Medium publication for women of colour. Pitch them at [email protected].
• Forge is about personal development. Pitch them at [email protected].
• Human Parts is Medium’s home for personal stories and perspectives. This is the only Medium pub I’m a writer with. Currently, they’re not accepting submissions.
• Marker is supposed to make you smarter about the world of business. Pitch them at [email protected].
• Level is a Medium publication for Black and Brown men. I couldn’t find their email, but I’d make an educated guess that it is: [email protected].
• Heated has the goal to showcase the links between food and just about everything else. You can send your pitches to Melissa McCart [email protected]
• Modus is a Medium publication about UX/UI design. Pitch them at [email protected].

And some other publications that Medium has teamed up with:

• Pulp is about sexuality. Here’s how to pitch them.
• Apparently is about parenting with Motherly. Here’s how to write for them.

The Medium emails that they send out usually contain a lot of useful information, so it’s worth it to read them for future reference.

Hope you’ll find some useful information. Happy Publishing.