Pop Picking

Tip Of The Day — Day 8 — Choose your subject carefully

This is part of a series of daily tips for writers which is published to share ideas and suggestions on our craft. Everyone will have different advice on how to write, so the tip below is just a personal selection which I hope you will find useful, and do share any of your own in the comments. I hope you find it useful.

Pick the subject of your article carefully. Long, worthy articles which are text-heavy and on obscure subjects like coding in Basic or saving the world from climate change do less well, while certain keywords are winners, such as any mention of a celebrity, cryptocurrency, or anything promising huge earnings or instant success!

Even better a combination of these. I read today that Michael Lewis gets paid $10 a word, so his new book “Going Infinite” on Sam Bankman-Fried (a made-up name if ever I heard one), which combines celebrity, crime and crypto, is going to be a nice earner! I don’t know whether to give up now or buy a copy.

It is also notable that Medium writers seem to love so-called “meta” articles: stories about the platform. Strangely for a writer based in Britain, where such things are rarely discussed, people seem to love reading and writing about earnings. In the words of a Harry Enfield character from the 1980s, called “Loadsamoney”, it is a case of “Show me your wad!” Or more likely, given something currently rotten in the state of Medium, authors complaining about earnings falling off a cliff edge! So writing about writing can be worth pursuing.

It is also worth investigating distribution carefully. For example, some topic groups like “Life” or “Self” have hundreds of thousands of followers, while an article on basket weaving in Western Mongolia may for some strange reason attract fewer eyeballs. There is a trade-off tension here though, because the topic groups with large followings also have far more articles, and hence more competition. Horses for courses, as the old saying goes, or it is what it is, to coin an annoying modern one.

Linked to distribution is the issue of trying to get your article into a publication, particularly one with the mythical powers of the Boost, which Robin Wilding very helpfully identifies in this useful article —

So try to make friends with the editor of one of these publications!

To round up with a neat conclusion, pick your subject carefully, think of your audience, consider distribution and publicity, and do your research before launching into your latest bestseller!

I hope you found this article useful, and do share any tips of your own in the comments.

Previous tips:

Day 1- The Notebook

Day 2 — Mind your language — learning new words —

Day 3 –Quotations

Day 4 — Dictionary and thesaurus —

Day 5 — Location —

Day 6 — Planning —

Day 7 — Reverse engineering success —