My Fun, Frustrating, Fatiguing, 3-Month Medium Experiment

Now what do I do?

When I started writing on Medium in mid-April, I committed to doing it as a three-month experiment with several objectives.

I wanted to see how many views I could get for my posts and how many followers. Of course, I hoped to make some money using the Medium Partner Program — that was actually one of the more important objectives. But I also wanted to enjoy the fun and freedom of writing on any topic I wanted and being able to publish immediately.

I’ve documented my first two months’ experience here:

At the end of the second month, these were my goals:

1. Publish 25 new stories.

2. Get to 250 followers.

3. Start an email list.

4. Earn at least $100 in the next 30 days.

5. Work toward becoming a top writer.

6. Gain 100 followers for my publication, Garden to Table.

7. Use Hootsuite to promote my stories on social media better and easier.

I did start email lists for both writing and gardening newsletters (Writing in Place and Garden to Table), but I fell short on the other goals.

Now that I’m at the end of my three-month experiment, it’s time to do a full reckoning.

Stories published and curated

I started out strong this past month writing several stories and submitting them to several publications. I got a number of rejections and lost a lot of time doing that. In the end, I only published 8 stories in 4 publications (including my own publication, Garden to Table), although one more story I wrote has been scheduled for publication for about a week.

One of the major disappointments of the past month is that only one of those stories was curated (under the topic “Pets”). One story still has the “Hang tight!” message so it might be curated eventually, but it is a story related to Medium, which I believe are not generally curated.

I’ve gone over the stories that were not distributed and really can’t figure out why they were passed over. It’s frustrating to suddenly not get curated when it was happening so easily for me the first two months.

So at the end of 3 months with 28 stories published, here are my stats:

My top story for Views was this:

My top story for Claps was this:

Publications

I’ve added 2 more publications to my list of publications I can write for: Illumination and The Brave Writer.

I’m continuing to grow my own gardening publication, Garden to Table, although so far it only has 5 followers.

Followers

I now have 193 followers, which is far below where I hoped I’d be, but a gain of more than 60 followers since I started writing in April.

Earnings

Earnings for the past month have been really disappointing and I’m feeling very frustrated that the Medium Partner Program makes their algorithms for earnings so opaque. My earnings so far for July are $2.76. For the 3-month period since I started writing, I’ve earned a grand total of $19.32.

My highest-earning story, with a total so far of $3.93, is this:

Going forward

While I didn’t expect writing on Medium to be a get-rich-quick scheme, I do find the earnings system to be really frustrating and discouraging. Medium switched to the current system last year, so maybe they will adjust it further. They should. They really, really should. I actually wrote a post with a few suggestions for bonuses that Medium could pay writers that would actually help to promote content and publications:

In spite of my frustrations with earnings, I’m not ready to quit Medium yet. I don’t think I can justify spending the time to post every day as many people suggest you need to do to get higher earnings. But I will continue to post as story ideas come to me and as my time allows.

I am particularly interested in growing the Garden to Table publication, partly because I think the public’s growing interest in gardening will benefit from it and partly because I have a revised edition of my California Fruit and Vegetable Gardening book coming out next spring that I’ll want to promote.

But all of that aside, it can be satisfying to publish on Medium. Going forward, I’m going to try to focus on writing what interests and intrigues me and put more emphasis on having fun with it.

Hopefully, an audience will follow.

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