Publications Are the Key to Success on Medium 🔑

Getting an article accepted into a publication can easily triple its views overnight.

You need publications

You’ve probably heard it before about Medium: you need publications. However, it’s easy advice to forget once you’ve been here a while.

In my case, I’ve published several recent articles on my Medium blog without submitting them to any publication at all. However, that is a dumb move, and you should never do it — even if you have a few thousand followers here.

Let’s look at a recent piece that I first published on my own, and then submitted to Better Marketing two weeks later:

Look at what happened when Better Marketing accepted my piece — there was an immediate, huge increase in the number of views:

That’s because Better Marketing reaches an audience of 10x more readers on Medium based on their follower count compared to mine. Their followers are specifically interested in one subject — marketing — while my readers are typically interested in other subjects, like programming and technology.

The other reason being in Better Marketing helped so much is simple social proof — they’re a good publication that only publishes great content.

It’s not just a publication’s follower count that matters, it’s the publication’s brand name and targeted audience.

So, if someone browsing their Medium Daily Digest email or the Medium app sees my piece as being in Better Marketing, they’re much more likely to want to read it than when when my piece was in no publication at all.

Publications can auto-curate you

Anonymous sources tell me that certain Medium publications that are partnered with Medium can curate your piece when they accept it — assuming the piece meets Medium’s curation guidelines, of course.

That means that you should really be submitting drafts to those publications, not finished pieces, as your finished pieces might not have been curated.

If the publication rejects you, you can still submit your draft to another publication or just publish it on your own for a second chance at curation.

I saw this first-hand recently with a Medium-owned publication, GEN, which changed the curation of my piece from just “Work” to both “Work” and “Sports” when they accepted it:

This article is a great example of how being in a bigger publication makes a difference, if you compare the change from when GEN ran the piece:

The day GEN published the piece, it was “Featured” on the homepage, which is marked in the graph above. Since then, I’ve had triple the internal views (300) in 2 weeks compared to 100 internal views in 2 months prior.

Being “Featured” on the homepage for a day helped, but not as much as simply being in a better publication.

Plus, savvy readers know that GEN is one of Medium’s top publications, even if they don’t know that it’s owned by Medium, so the social proof of being associated with their name brand helps my article immensely.

Submit drafts to publications

When you’re submitting to publications, you should almost always submit unpublished drafts, and let the publication hit Publish for you.

“Please submit unpublished drafts. Here’s why: Medium’s algorithm favors fresh stories, and our homepage is sorted by date of when the article was published (not when it was accepted into the publication).” — Publishous Guidelines

Simply put, Medium publications favor drafts and having control over their publication schedule. Plus, the previously-mentioned Medium-partnered publications can curate you when they accept your piece.

On the other hand, when pitching Medium-owned publications (via email), it’s totally fine to submit previously published work, like I did with the GEN piece above. That’s because the Medium-owned publications will change the date on your piece to the new date of publication.

However, you can submit finished pieces to publications as well, like I did with the piece that got me into Better Marketing mentioned earlier.

There is sometimes a reason to just hit the Publish button before you’ve submitted to a publication such as if you’re trying to match a specific publication schedule that you have personally, or if you’ve written a piece that’s just not a good fit for any publications that you currently write for.

Even if you publish you should always be looking to get the pieces in a publication at a later time.

Medium publications love to pick up curated content.

It’s pretty common that if you write a piece that gets curated, than a publication will come along in the next few days (such as The Startup or Data Driven Investor for technology articles) and ask you to submit it to them.

Of the twenty-seven publications I can write for on Medium, I got into half of them by applying directly, but the other half I got into when they asked me to submit my self-published work to them after it was curated.

Should you start your own publication?

There’s no financial incentive to run your own publication on Medium, so it’s basically a volunteer position. Always keep that in mind when submitting to publications as well, and have some patience with them!

If you start a “Medium-partnered publication,” then you can make some money, but it’s really just to cover your overhead in terms of editors. If that’s something that interests you, then you can pitch Medium here:

I currently have two of my own publications on Medium, but I don’t accept other writers. One is for my technical articles that won’t be accepted by Medium’s technical publications because of my use of relaxing photography:

The other is just somewhere to stick my random articles that don’t ever get picked up by any publication, just for a touch more personal branding:

I’d like to eventually start accepting submissions on Coding at Dawn. I’m also considering joining an existing Medium publication as an editor, but again there’s a financial disincentive to doing so.

My point is that starting a Medium publication is usually a waste of time and effort — I’d be much better off financially with all of these articles by getting them in mainstream publications on this platform.

However, I’m stubborn and have strong ideas about branding. In my case, I’ll eventually be starting some other publications that will be open to other authors. I just need to get my earnings here to the point where I have time to actually pursue that, because running a real publication is a luxury.

That said, there’s something really admirable about volunteer work in any field, and being an editor on your own Medium publication is one of the best ways you can give back to the community of writers at large.

Conclusion

Yes, publications matter on Medium — they can 3x, 4x, or 5x your earnings, easily. All of my top-earning pieces are in big publications.

If you’re trying to make a living wage on this platform, then you need to write quickly and reach the largest possible audience, as I wrote about recently:

On the other hand, don’t worry too much if you keep getting rejected — even top-earners like Tim Denning get rejected by Medium publications:

You’re going to get rejected, which you’ll typically find out only because a publication has not taken any action on your draft for 2 weeks.

When that happens, simply submit the draft to another publication, and repeat the cycle a few times, maybe for 3–5 publications.

If they all reject it, then publish it on your own. You may be surprised when a publication stops by later to pick it up — it happens all the time!

Best of luck out there! Please feel free to connect with me if you have any questions or want to chat about your experience: DoctorDerek.com 🥳

Further Reading

• Zita Fontaine explains Medium-owned vs. Medium-partnered publications in her piece on Better Marketing on this subject:

• Like most authors here, I got my start using the fantastic site Smedian, where you can find Medium publications to submit your work to:

• You may not know some of these fun tips for your Medium profile:

• I’ve discussed how you can increase your follower count here before:

• And, you may hate the advice, but you should publish daily for a while:

Dr. Derek Austin is the author of Career Programming: How You Can Become a Successful 6-Figure Programmer in 6 Months, now available on Amazon.