The eternal con
They Promised Millions for Twenty Bucks
Bargain, hey?
When I was a girl, I’d read the newspapers — remember them? — from end to end. Words in a row; just couldn’t get enough.
In between the cartoons and the sports pages were the classifieds. Most of them pretty heavy going, though the “Personals” were always a lucky dip.
There was one sort of advert that came up again and again, and I’d contemplate sending in the money they asked — a solid investment for me at the time — in order to receive the certain wealth they promised.
Send off for the advertiser’s sure-fire racing system and the winnings would come rolling in.
What could possibly go wrong?
Even in the days before I learned about probability and statistics there seemed to be a flaw in this proposition.
If the system was so good, why would you be hawking it at twenty bucks a pop? Wouldn’t it be easier to just use your own system to beat the bookies?
And, alternatively, if you were sharing your secret knowledge for the greater good of mankind, then wouldn’t the bookmakers sending you the big cheques on a regular basis quickly go bust? Wouldn’t you be killing the goose that laid the golden egg?
The system actually worked!
I asked a wise man about this, and he responded that the system was working and money was being made. The papers didn’t run advertising for free, so obviously whoever was placing the ads was making a profit from the deal, otherwise they’d stop doing it.
Fast forward um, a number of years, and I see the same deal in operation right here.
Medium is full of stories like this. Just do a search for “How I Made…” and you may scroll through the resulting list without ever reaching the end.
And they are all the same
Read them. They all start off the same way, with a headline and a money shot.
How I made ten thousand bucks on Medium
After that, they diverge along two different paths:
- I made $10 000 and it was wonderful, here’s a screenshot and this is what sort of champagne I bought.
- Here’s a list of writing platitudes that begins with “Write Every Day”.
It works, I tell you, because the writers get a cent from everyone who falls for their clickbait snake oil, and if they get enough cents from enough readers, they can cough up the five bucks needed for the next month on Medium,
Lord knows there are enough people doing it. There must be something in it.
What these stories don’t deliver is a system that will actually guarantee you thousands every Medium pay day. Sure, you can follow all their advice and write stories with killer headlines every day for a month, but if I have one guarantee for you it is this:
You will NOT earn $10 000 a month on a regular basis.
You might get lucky
Yeah, the wheels might spin and give you a win. You can write about your lucky story a few times and post the genuine screenshot — hell, I did! — but it was likely a fluke.
By my count, this is story number 334 for me in just under two years of writing, and I’ve had one story that has earned me four times as much as all the other 333 combined.
It’s not even close. My next best story brought in 1% of the money as the top earner did.
I flatter myself that I write in an entertaining fashion without the grammar police hunting me down and stringing me up, and I do all the right things. Like writing every second day.
If there’s any consistency it’s that nothing I write gets more than a polite round of applause.
Except for that one story. I’ve tried to pull it off again, but no dice. The stars aligned just once, the money came flooding in, but it never repeated and after a few months I stopped writing “How I was fabulously successful on Medium with no talent” stories.
I’m going to do it again
It was that one story. It had a good title, a titillating story, a whimsical twist, some great beach images and somehow it worked.
It actually worked twice, because after I published it here on ILLUMINATION, I took it across to ILLUMINATION-Curated and it did even better.
So I’m going to have a third bite of the cherry.
I packaged it up with a few of my other stories based around the theme of bad sex and good travel, sent it off to an editor I know who charged me fifty bucks an hour to proofread it and red-pencil all my sins, and once I get my act together I’ll run it through Vellum, send it off to Amazon, and publish it for real.
My stories for the next few weeks might be heavy on the process but it’s an exciting time for me and who knows, maybe I’ll have some advice to give, and maybe I’ll make the big bucks.
In the meantime, here’s some advice that cost me a lot of money…
Before publishing and making a big commitment, run your book through a professional. Not friends and family. Someone who knows what they are doing.
I did, and even though I’ve read all my stories in the golden glow of authorship like about a hundred times each, this guy still picked up some absolute howlers. In my research, my grammar, my punctuation, my spelling. He had some words of praise but he also had some pointed remarks about my writerly shortcomings.
I am grateful for the advice and the experience. I wish I were half the editor he is.
So that’s the system
It works. Find a professional, get them to pick your writing apart in a dispassionate fashion, and follow their advice.
Otherwise, it’s luck or wishes.
Good luck and best wishes!
Britni
This story contains an affiliate link. I picked a book with an interesting title at random. I haven’t read it, perhaps I should.