I’d Like To Thank Illumination For Having The Guts To Publish Kim Mia’s Article

For every 500 marketers there is one genuine writer

I had a hard day at work and came home bitter, stressed, and exhausted. I work at a local council, and the residents of our community have seen a lot of hardship and suffering, especially with recent floods that have destroyed homes and families.

It seems like much of the planet is suffering right now, whether through war, climate change, or wealth inequality. It is the brutal reality we are living through, and it is not going to get any easier. So imagine my surprise when I pulled up my Medium feed and saw optimism just flowing off the charts:

Stories like, How I Just Joined The $1,000 Per Month Club Writing For Medium How To Inject Your Stats With Steroids With These 7 Simple Tips How To Quit Your Day Job And Make $40,000 Per Month In Your Sleep 10 Key Steps To Rocket Launch Your Career As A Top Medium Writer

I mean this wasn’t just optimism, this was delirium. I’m thinking, what’s happened to Medium? Is this a platform for writers or for marketers? The more I scrolled, the more it looked like one long wall of spam and advertising. I kept scrolling.

I Just Became A Top Writer For The 40th Time Why All Of My Stories Get Curated Without Fail Make $50,000 Per Story By Following My Secret Sauce

This was getting depressing. There is nothing that can make a bad day even worse quite like the exaggerated bragging of false advertising.

Then something remarkable happened.

In the midst of my depressing scrolling, I came across an article by Kim Mia published by ILLUMINATION titled, How To Make Money Writing Online: Lie .

It flew by so quickly during my scrolling that I nearly missed it. It was wedged in between two more stories about bragging your head off about making more money than everyone else and being far more successful than you’ll ever be.

And being tired after a full day’s work, with my eyes glazing over, I nearly missed that one single word ‘Lie’ at the end of Kim’s all too familiar beginning of her title, How To Make Money Writing Online. I had to do a double-take. I thought, is this satire? I clicked on the story to read it.

Where do I begin? I’ll start with her subtitle:

“The reason I stepped away from writing for months- I got tired of the bullsh*t”.

We will keep the asterisk in the subtitle to maintain accuracy, even if it was an editing decision. Although I do wonder why there are not more asterisks in the tens of thousands of I’m-More-Successful-Than-You articles.

Kim starts off the article with a plain-spoken Declaration Of War:

“I won’t waste either of our time and get straight to the point. We need to talk about it; The secret piece of the puzzle that every “successful” online writer knows but refuses to let you in on because it exposes their real reason for success.”

Already I was beginning to snap out of my stupid stupor I had fallen into after being hypnotized by the Wall of Spam the Medium algorithm was intent on spoon-feeding me. I sat up straight in my seat on the tram. This caught my interest. I read on.

“Not the crap they try to sell you (for which I was definitely guilty of as well, considering I was falling down that rabbit hole). Things like: “You probably didn’t work hard enough so you didn’t make as much money as me…” or “Here’s a long, useless article of me pretending to give you useful writing tips but actually making you increase my views with absolutely zero takeaways” or my favorite manipulative trick of all time: “You’ll start making money if you buy my writing guide (or whatever bullsh*t product I’m marketing to you)! ”

Now my attention was 100% engaged: razor-sharp, interested, even fascinated. Who is this Lion, I was asking myself? Can I really be reading this?This fearless writer had enough of the very crap I was drowning in on the Medium feed and she was fiercely calling it out. I was loving every minute of it. I continued reading:

“Where do you think these same writers make their money? Think about it; the majority of their revenue is built around writing pieces that are teaching other people how to write. If you take a look at most top writers, a shocking number of their articles are writing tutorials or tips for making money from writing online. Much like many entrepreneurs, talking about making money is how they make money so it serves their best interest to keep an illusion of a “secret ingredient” that they have access to and are willing to hand over to you, but ONLY if you pay for it.”

She nailed it. Have these writers any shame? Of course not, they are making themselves and making Medium money. Which is why my Medium feed is full of Marketers and Advertisers instead of real Writers.

“Simply put, they profit off of you believing you’re an unqualified, average writer that has a lot to learn from their professional experience so they can keep selling courses and webinars and the cycle keeps going on.”

Kim goes on to say she succumbed to this temptation herself and became a successful writer on Medium, until…

“Until I got sick of it. Sick of the whole game of pretending like I know something that my readers don’t and dangling a fake piece of gold in front of them and dragging them along with me from one article to the next while I make money from their naivety.”

Kim then neatly sums her conclusion from hard fought experience:

“How to make money from writing online? Make sh*t up. That’s it. That’s the answer. You don’t need to be an expert on a given topic. You hardly even need to research it. Most websites, including this one, don’t even fact-check articles. Just write a piece of absolute horsesh*t and cap it off with a full-blown misleading clickbait title and voila! You are now a successful online “writer”.”

Wow. I was floored. Here was a Lion not afraid to roar. Here was a genuine writer. She ends on a note of sober, clear-eyed courageous realism and supreme dignity:

“I’ll continue to write but as honest and real as I’m capable of and if that means my audience and payroll drops to zero then so be it.”

Feeling tired, depressed, drowning in the dregs of Capitalism’s cynicism, scrolling through the waste and debris of online spam after a full day’s work on my tram ride home, I came across an absolute Diamond.

It was the first time I smiled all day.

© Carlo Zeno 2022

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Thank you for reading. Special thanks to Kim Mia and the team at ILLUMINATION for having the guts to publish her piece and making me smile. For more of my work, see two below: