How to prepare for vacation when you are a Medium Writer

Publish at least one article every day, the successful medium authors advise us. But everyone needs a holiday. So what do we do when we plan to go away for a week or two?

The crash

To earn money as a medium writer, you have to build an audience. The more followers and fans you have, the higher the chance that your articles will be seen and read.

But the competition here is enormous. If you don’t publish a new article for just one week, you’ll immediately notice a drop in reader engagement and a drop in earnings.

Medium’s algorithm is merciless. Show up every day, or you will soon be forgotten.

I had to experience this for myself when I had to take a long forced break in June and July of this year. In May, I had started to publish an article on Medium every day, and my earnings and followers increased day by day and week by week.

But then the deadline for my new novel approached and I had to decide: Either I continue on Medium as before and miss my deadline, or I take care of my Kindle business intensively and exclusively until I have published and promoted the new novel.

The decision was easy for me. Since I had only just started on Medium, there was not much money for me to lose here yet. My Kindle books, on the other hand, have been paying my rent for months. That’s why I took a break on Medium.

When I returned to the platform in August, I almost had to start from scratch.

None of my articles still got views or reads. My newsletter subscribers (not many anyway) hadn’t heard from me for weeks.

Reconstruction

It was discouraging to see my stats so down. I started writing on Medium because I wanted to build a new business here, and now I had lost two months.

That shouldn’t happen to me again, and so I started to publish an article every day again.

Soon my statistics improved again. I saw that regular publishing was really the key to success.

I also followed another advice given by numerous successful authors on Medium to every beginner: I created my own publication.

From now on, I wanted to write articles regularly for people who, like me, earn their living as professional authors and for people who want to achieve the same.

The first followers came quickly, and the number of articles in the publication grew steadily. From October, I plan to publish articles by other authors in “The full time writer.”

My profile has over 1000 followers for a few days, and my publication has 16.

My articles are regularly curated again, and I have numerous contacts with other authors who are very helpful.

All this I do while I continue to write my thrillers. My new thriller entered the German top 100 Kindle charts yesterday, and today I finished a short story for an anthology.

So I have enough work. But about a week ago I realized that I had a problem.

The challenge

The problem is my wife, and I are about to go on a two-week vacation. Working on holiday is out of the question because firstly we won’t have reliable access to the Internet there and secondly my wife would rip my head off if I worked on holidays. This time is only for us.

But that means that my medium career is in danger again. I don’t want to accept another interruption. If I don’t continue to publish an article every day, everything I’ve worked out in the last two months will be obsolete again.

So what should I do?

Writing articles in advance

I’m already writing articles in stock for the weekends. I don’t write on Saturdays and Sundays, so I write two additional articles during the week and schedule them for those days using Medium’s schedule function.

We will be on holiday for eleven days. So I need eleven articles in stock. Besides, there is the next weekend, which is still before our vacation. All in all, there are thirteen articles that I have to write additionally until our vacation (in addition to the one piece I write every day anyway).

For a few days now I’ve been writing three articles a day. If I can keep this up until one day before the holiday, I have enough pieces in the waiting loop so that I don’t have to worry about them on holiday.

My readers will continue to hear from me every day, and the algorithm can’t forget me.

How do you prepare for your holiday?

Do you also write articles on stock and use the schedule function? Or do you belong to those who sit in front of their laptops while on vacation to write your articles?

I would be happy to read in the comments about how you deal with this topic.