Small Pubs Are More Than Just For Gaining Eyeballs on Your Post

It is about being part of a community

Pub or no pub

I know each of us has preferences regarding how we want to publish articles. Some love to self-publish while others love to go with pubs and yet some others like to go exclusively with the big pubs.

After two years of writing on this platform and doing the whole nine yards, I would say it all comes down to your audience.

If you build a loyal base, it doesn’t matter where you publish because they will either find you through a notification alerting them you’ve published or they’ll come looking for you because they enjoy reading your posts.

When writers post celebratory articles about reaching the ‘x’K followers milestone achieved, it makes me wonder why they’re doing that because I have never believed that to be a measure of success. And it’s kind of sad to see that despite having many followers, there hardly seems to be any engagement unless they tag bomb or use some similar tactic to garner attention.

Let me share a cautionary tale about Read 4 Read. When I was a newbie, Facebook groups were the thing. Everybody worth their salt was forming one and I being new to the game joined one out of FOMO. It was simply a place where articles go to die. From morning till night, writers would randomly drop links to their articles and vanish.

It was depressing and demoralizing because nobody was reading and nobody cared. Or they’d clap n’ run in the hopes that you’d return the favor.

So, I left and never went back. That is no way to build an engaged audience.

However, the more important question is — where are they all now?

It is the truth that I say that I only see one other writer still active on Medium out of all the writers from that big group.

Small pubs

I am not shy about saying that I was big on engagement way before it became fashionable. However, it’s funny that I have had people scoff at my engagement levels from the beginning, calling them vanity metrics. That too despite delivering at the back end in terms of views.

I wonder what those people are up to these days?

Yes, boosts can help as well as articles going viral — but at the end of the day, the bottom line is still going to be engagement.

So where do we begin if we’re hoping to build a community — and by extension, engagement organically?

In my case, I have always had a special relationship with small pubs.

The reason why I go with pubs is I enjoy being part of a close-knit community where everyone knows each other and is pretty much like-minded with regards to co-elevating one other.

Also, many of my Medium friends own pubs and I feel it is all part of building a community to contribute and be part of their growth.

I have maintained a steady publishing pace with an emphasis on quality. Again, some know-it-alls tried to dissuade me by saying my strategy was all wrong and that volume is what will enable a newbie to gain traction.

I wonder what they’re thinking these days?

My point is everyone has an opinion but there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each writer is different and has their comfort levels, strengths, and weaknesses. So best is to go at it through a process of trial and error rather than following someone’s advice blindly.

Here are the benefits of self-publishing that I listed in a short form that received tremendous feedback probably because it offers easy-to-understand and to-the-point advice:

On the other hand, here is another short form with the pros of going with pubs:

With regard to the pubs I go with, I normally don’t go outside the half a dozen or so pubs that I publish with simply because I have a long-standing relationship with them and because of their rapid turnaround time which is very, very important to me (since I stick to a publishing schedule).

But every once in a while I enjoy publishing a new and upcoming pub or a pub that motivates me enough to just want to publish with them, oftentimes with surprising results. For example, this blog was for a brand new pub On Reflection👇

#boosted

Some other upcoming pubs I enjoy writing for include my friend Trisha Faye’s Good Vibes Club which is an excellent pub for positivity and joy, Adrian CDTPPW’s Read and Die! Gabriela Korosi’s Dancing Elephant’s Press, Liberty Forrest’s Hope*Healing*Humor, Misbah Sheikhs The Hub Pub and Ali Hall’s Spread the Ripple.

🎈I’m interested in knowing what niches you write in and which are your go-to pubs — do share!