Joining the $500 a Month Club

It only took me eight months!

It’s official. I have earned over $500 for this month of September. I’ve never done that before.

And the month is not over.

At this rate, my month’s paypacket will be somewhere around $800.

But even if it does not climb any higher, Medium is going to give me five hundred of your American dollars, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

Thanks to ILLUMINATION-Curated

This is really all due to one story, and one publication.

I wrote — way back in June — a fun little story about travel and sex. By some magic, all the ducks lined up nicely, it got curated, gained a bit of visibility, and Dr Mehmet Yildiz was kind enough to promote it a little outside Medium.

My winnings, I mean earnings tapered off over June, July, and August, until two weeks ago, when ILLUMINATION-Curated launched, and I moved my curated stories across.

As you see from the screenshot, the thing took off like a rocket all over again, pushed over the thousand dollar mark, and just kept on going!

Speaking as an editor…

I’ve been curated dozens of times, and most of those have only made a dollar or two. So curation isn’t a golden goose. But it helps.

Getting a story into a format where it may be curated is a very good first step along the way. Ticking all those boxes of good readable language, correctly captioned images and so on is just good practice.

Editors will love you for being thorough and consistent, and publication will be a breeze, so long as your story meets the needs of the publication.

You will develop followers who are keen to read your curation-worthy stories. Just quietly, but most stories on Medium don’t meet that standard, and it shows. Get to that point and you are ahead of the pack, because, well, all else being equal, readers prefer stories where they don’t have to wrestle with the spelling and grammar and it reads professional.

In other news…

I’ve written twenty-two stories so far this month, a little over one every day. The most any one of them made was nearly six dollars, and most way less. There has been some continuing income from past stories.

A lot of my time is taken up with reading and editing. I’m an editor for at least two publications, and those two have high volumes of work, checking submitted stories for compliance with the rules, working with the writers to make improvements, and promoting them a little after publication.

And, of course, I could happily spend all day every day reading Medium stories. As it is, I miss out on so much!

And people keep on writing more and more!

Britni