Medium Tips: Email Subscriptions vs List Saves

You have two ways to automatically get stories from your favourite writers. Which is best?

As you start reading stories on Medium, you’ll find your favourite writers. You’ll follow them.

However, a follow doesn’t guarantee that the system will show you everything a writer publishes. Medium seems to put newly-published articles into just a percentage of a writer’s follower feeds.

Plus, if you follow a lot of people, then new stories can just get lost in the mix. You might not have the time or willpower to go through all your feeds to find your writers.

Luckily, there are a couple of ways to find out when a writer publishes. You can subscribe to get email notifications or save one of their lists.

Let’s look at how these options work and their pros and cons.

Email subscriptions: what to know

You can subscribe to receive emails from any writer. When you do this, the system will send you an email every time the writer publishes anything.

Subscribing has a few advantages:

• You get an automatic notification in your Inbox when a writer publishes. So, you don’t miss out on reading their stories.
• You don’t have to waste time searching the site to find your favourite writers’ work.
• You don’t have to remember who your favourite writers are. I know this sounds weird but if you follow a lot of people, then it’s hard to hold them all in your brain. Maybe that’s just me though.

However, email subscriptions also have some disadvantages:

• If a writer regularly publishes a lot of stories and/or you subscribe to a lot of accounts, then you could have emails pinging in 24/7 on top of the regular messages you get from Medium. This can be overwhelming.
• You can’t pick and choose what you see. You get everything a writer publishes.
• The system doesn’t work perfectly. Sometimes, it skips a story or stops sending emails from a writer.
• Any writer you subscribe to gets your email address. They might send you newsletters whether you want them or not.

Despite these downsides, I like to subscribe to emails. It’s an easy way to get kind-of-sort-of guaranteed access to stories.

However, once I started doing this, I changed my email address on the site. I set up a new Gmail account that I only use for Medium. My main email Inbox doesn’t get clogged up, and I can leave notifications out of sight until I have time to look at them.

I also — whisper it — only read some of the story notifications I get. You don’t have to read everything someone writes just because you subscribe to their email list.

It’s not the law. Delete email notifications you aren’t interested in. The reading police won’t give you a ticket.

List saves: what to know

People typically use lists to set up their own reading lists on Medium. However, you can also use a list to follow some of a writer’s stories and to get notifications when they publish.

For example, I’ve recently organised all my stories into thematic lists. I write on a lot of different topics and wanted to set up a system where people can find what they like to read more easily.

My writing mind goes in some odd directions, and I’m aware that people miss some stuff they might read as my list of stories grows and probably gets weirder. Some people are interested in some of my topics but would rather chew off a leg without an anaethestic than read others.

That’s cool. Nobody wants to read every book in a library.

As long as you make a list public, then people can save it to their own library. When they do this, they can look at your list from their profile. It automatically updates every time you add a story to it.

More importantly, they get a notification whenever you publish a story and add it to the list they’ve saved.

Saving lists has some advantages:

• You get to cherry-pick the articles you want to read from a writer who uses thematic lists. You only get a notification if they publish and add something to the list(s) you’ve saved.
• You reduce the number of emails coming into your Inbox.
• You can easily find a newly-published article by opening the list in your profile.

However, saving lists also has some disadvantages:

• If a writer forgets to add an article to a list, then you won’t be notified when they publish.
• The system doesn’t work perfectly. There might be times when you don’t get an automatic notification.
• Some writers don’t use lists to organise their stories.

This last bullet point is the main problem here. I would like to save more lists but not all the writers I follow use them.

Given that lists can be a great self-marketing tool, writers should think about setting some up. You’ll feel more organised, and you can use a list link as a CTA at the bottom of a story.

Lists are also a great tool for fiction writers who publish multi-part series. You can bring all the parts of your series into one easy to find place (thanks to E. Ardincaple for mentioning this in a comment).

Plus, you can guide new readers to your lists if you write a short story about your system and pin it to your profile. They can immediately access the topics that interest them rather than having to scroll down your open list of stories trying to find that needle in the haystack.

This is especially useful for older stories that often languish unseen at the bottom of your page. If you put your articles in lists, then you make older work more accessible (hint: it’ll earn more if people suddenly start reading it again).

Don’t just take my word for it. Victoria Kjos recently called for more writers to use this tool because she’d really like easier access to people’s stories too.

And, if you’re interested in seeing how thematic lists work, you can find mine here: