THE SECRETS OF WRITING ON MEDIUM, PART 16
The Choice is Yours: Publishing Nirvana or an Eternity in Curgatory™
A newbie primer that tells the truth, warts and all, about online writing.
Today, we’re going to talk about the C-word and our obsession with getting some.
Admit it, it’s all we think about — even you women — and the hope of it makes us tingle with excitement.
Wait… you didn’t think that I was talking about the female private parts, were you?
We writers may be horny, but the word I’m talking about is taboo around these parts. I can’t even mention it, or those gatekeepers of the P-wall (yeah, I don’t think I can mention that word, either) are going to send my message to the bottom of your feed, never to be seen again.
In case you still don’t know which C-word I’m talking about, let me provide the dictionary definition, so you can see how fucked up (now there’s an expression that’s not taboo in these parts) the publishing game is.
/kyəˈrāSHən/ noun
- The action or process of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition.
Not feeling it, yet? How about this (bolded type is mine for emphasis):
- The selection, organization, and presentation of online content, merchandise, information, etc., typically using professional or expert knowledge.
Okay, maybe you’re still confused — I know I am.
There are so many featured articles on this platform that contain outright bullshit, from “just say no” to your problems, to advocating some variation of The Secret as a substitute for science-based psychological treatments for PTSD, to the cheaters in a marriage focusing on their misery while ignoring the damage done to the victim and their children. Is anyone with even the smallest amount of “professional or expert knowledge” vetting this garbage?
I’m sorry, but the “Laws of Attraction” don’t get a seat at the same dinner table with evolution, gravity, and relativity.
Here are a few examples of the capricious and unknowable nature of the Alpo-rithm (Roz Warren once wrote that Corgis are the arbiters of C-word), quoting the rules set forth on the holy virtual tablets in the Support Center:
- Does it add value for the reader? Because multiple articles by content marketers who quote Marcus Aurelius and then babble on in generalities are better than just reading the original quotes or essays written by scholars.
- Does it have a clear and relevant headline that lets the reader know what the story is about? As evidenced by the fact that every other headline is either a listicle, sounds like something above the fold of the National Enquirer, or trumpets how much money someone made from writing. Those all sound suspiciously like the definition of clickbait: a hyperbolic claim, a too-wide curiosity gap, a titillating image. How often does one of those stories leave you unsatisfied?
- No meta — no stories written about M-word. I have seen many articles in my feed with headlines that mention the M-word. Haven’t you?
So how can anyone figure out the path to Nirvana when all we get are mixed signals and a constant narrative about “quality” that’s the best example of gaslighting since the film Gaslight?
The answer is you can’t.
It’s like the Kobayashi Maru, a Star Trek training simulation that put Starfleet Academy cadets in a no-win situation. Captain Kirk beat the test by cheating. In the same way, you, dear reader, are determined to make it in the online publishing world and have come for three ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶d̶e̶s̶ guaranteed paths to Nirvana.
First, we need to establish a baseline so you can objectively view your work as solid. It doesn’t have to be transcendent, or you’d already be working with real magazines or book publishers (BTW, I design cool book covers, just in case you need something).
Do you:
- Work at the craft of writing by reading articles, buying books, taking classes, or working with a coach?
- Use either an online editor like Grammarly or the Hemingway Editor, or have an actual person edit your work?
- Put in the research so you aren’t just talking out of your ass about serious subjects?
- Do searches to see how many similar articles already exist, and either find a new subject or find a slightly different perspective that would give people a reason to look at your piece?
If you’re still with me, let’s begin.
Path #1. Submit to the top publications on M-word and don’t take no for an answer.
I’m not kidding. If you look at the home page for this site, you will see a list of publications running along the top, so they are literally the top publications. One could debate about the relative merit of these publications compared to others that are not owned, sponsored and promoted by the corporate overlords for whom you toil endlessly, but if you want to get some C-word, this is the place to submit.
Of course, the crucial word here is submit, so don’t think you can actually refuse to take no for an answer. What I mean by that is you must maintain your courage, and not let a few hundred rejections stop you from continuing to submit.
Hard.
Over and over again.
If having pain inflicted on you by some stranger in new and humiliating ways sounds a little too close to something you see Paul Giammati do on Billions, you may have started to figure out the real secret to becoming a successful writer — the willingness and ability to suffer for years at a time.
Some other publications have such a large following, you will get C-worded if they accept your articles. Roz says so, right here. (I won’t use the normal article link because it contains too many of the taboo words.)
If you ask her for the secret, she will tell you she doesn’t know either, and this is someone who has written for the NY Times. My guess is no one working for our corporate overlords has attained that level of excellence as a writer, and yet the vast majority of her writings here are ignored by the Alpo-rithm.
Remember: don’t give up, because getting some has almost nothing to do with the quality of your writing.
If you research all the articles about getting C-worded, the most common points made by writers are: “we have no idea how it works,” and “the Alpo-rithm ignored our best articles.”
Path #2. Learn to become a master of social media marketing.
No matter how many times you read clickbait articles like “I made $11,369 this month from writing, and you can, too,” remember that the people writing them are like shovel salesmen. Not because they are shoveling their bullshit (even though that’s also true), but because they are selling services to all you starving gold prospectors out there. The secret sauce they all leave out is how they developed a huge social media following.
If you have 20,000 followers or more, you only need 1% of them to clap 10 times for your articles to be among the top 1% of articles on this platform. You will have a large enough readership to get thousands of views and guess what the Alpo-rithm loves more than anything? (Hint: it ain’t high quality, passionate writing.)
The Alpo-bots (maybe even the Corbis are mechanical; productivity would skyrocket if no one has to walk the dogs or clean up any accidents that occur in the office) get excited by high readership, and they’ll put out lots of C-word for someone who is already bringing in lots of eyeballs.
It’s like the old saying about banks — they only lend money to the people who don’t need it.
Just remember that the real payoff from social media marketing will not be in your writing; it will be in the selling. Of the $451,238 that 30-year-old made from blogging, over 92% of it came from affiliate sales.
And for people trying to make it by writing books in today’s market, bow down and worship at the feet of Mark Dawson, a modern-day god of self-publishing.
Path #3. Learn to respect, love, and, most importantly, hype your corporate overlords.
In the years before he became a caricature of himself sitting courtside at Lakers games, Jack Nicholson delivered this all-time powerful speech about the sacrifices made by the men and women who protect our freedoms from the enemies at the gates. His speech also applies to the writing platform we love, then hate, then love to hate, then leave, and then come back because nothing else is any better.
How’s that for a rousing endorsement?
Here’s the clip:
To paraphrase Jack’s speech:
“Son (or daughter as the case may be), we live in a world that has P-walls, and those P-walls have to be guarded by Corgi bots with Alpo-rithms…”
The C-word system has nothing to do with finding the best writing being done on this platform — that would take far too many people and too many hours to read the thousands of articles submitted every day.
In October 2018, a data writer used a piece of code to scrape the data off 993,000 articles written here between August 2017 and August 2018. That’s over 2700 articles per day, every day. Since then, the number of writers here has exploded so there may be 4,000–5,000 articles per day published, so the Corgi-bots must be responsible for 60–100 articles.
If the average 5-minute article is 1,500 words long, each Corgi-bot must read and evaluate 90,000 to 150,000 words per day. How many people can stay awake, let alone engaged, reading that much in an eight-hour day?
In that kind of work environment, the motivation of each Corgi-bot is to find as many short-cuts as possible to determine who gets some C-word and who gets put in the dog house. And that leads back to the pathways described above: having your work appear in a corporate-backed or massively popular publication, or having an enormous social media following.
But there is a third pathway, and it’s as simple as throwing the dog a bone.
Instead of bitching about the Corgi-bots like me and everyone else, you can put on a smile, polish your best apple, and make sure to show those overworked souls (canines, formulas, who knows?) some love.
You can do this by helping new writers join the platform. Roz got a swell t-shirt that way! (I hate to break the news, sis, but your t-shirt was some leftover stock featuring a logo they dumped three years ago. For graphic design aficionados, I wrote an analysis of the new typography here in response to some pompous reviewer calling the new logo “punctilious.”)
You can do it by writing positive, inspirational pieces to keep subscribers active and interested (life, life lessons, health, love, and self-improvement make up almost half of the top 10 most popular tags).
My friend P.G. Barnett tries to assuage the misery of fellow writers by bringing a message of empathy:
As a writer, I know what it’s like to just quit. I totally understand what’s going on when another of my sister and brother writers tell me they’ve had it, they just can’t do this anymore. I feel their pain because I’ve felt their pain, and it ain’t pretty.
So do quitters ever win? Possibly, if you understand, it’s okay to quit sometimes. Do winners ever quit?
All the time, they just never give up.
Because of it, people like him, regardless of how the Corgi-bots are treating him these days.
And that, friends, is another form of publishing nirvana.
Finally, here’s what NOT to do.
I used to get my share of C-word, especially for my main area of expertise, sports. I was given those empty titles like “top writer in sports” and “top writer in NBA.” I was even given the title “top writer in Humor,” for those of you who don’t get my sense of humor. But all of that changed when I started digging too deep into the inner workings of the Alpo-rithm.
During that time, I had been a lone wolf howling in the wilderness, trying to warn the innocent about the dangers of external validation and get-rich-quick schemes, trying to warn all you gold prospectors that the ̶s̶n̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶o̶i̶l̶ ̶s̶a̶l̶e̶s̶m̶e̶n̶ shovel salesmen were not telling you the hole (not a typo) story.
The closer I got to the truth, the more I started to point out that the emperor has no clothes, which is not that shocking because how many Corgis do you know that wear clothes, to begin with?
But there has been a price to pay.
Despite the almost 3 million views and thousands of up-votes I’ve gotten on that other writing platform that promotes the best answers to the top of the feed based on user feedback, I haven’t had even the smallest sniff of some C-word here. Even though I used to be a professional tennis player and coach, and have followers who think I should be featured on ESPN, my recent articles about tennis here have been buried like turds in a litter box.
Don’t mess with those Corgi-bots. They’ve got feelings, too.
I’m not even the best at being the worst; this guy is positively radioactive.
There’s another writer I follow, and his story is even worse than mine. While I can’t get no satisfaction, the powers-that-be Un-C-worded his articles. I’m almost afraid to mention his name, so I’ll spell it out in a way that it might get past the Alpo-rithm: R-O-L-L-I. He’s the guy who drinks a lot of coffee.
His crime was pointing out the true dark underbelly of this platform, as he exposed criminal activity here while the corporate overlords did nothing except screw with him.
A big positive message to send off confused readers feeling vaguely encouraged!
When you are focused/obsessed with peak performance as an athlete, you do everything to stretch beyond your physical, mental, emotional, and psychological limitations. The work is fulfilling but it’s really hard because a big part of what elite athletes can achieve in their careers has to do with the willingness and ability to suffer.
Rafael Nadal, one of my all-time favorite tennis players, is the greatest fighter in tennis history because of his capacity to endure. He put it as well as anyone:
“I learned during my career to enjoy suffering.” — Rafael Nadal
That is not the kind of sexy message to inspire writers to become the best they can be. I’m never going to be one of those “I did X, and you can, too!” kind of salesmen because I knew how painful it was when I was climbing the wall of professional tennis. Like its parallel on Game of Thrones, the vast majority of people never survive the ascent.
I could say that if you worked as hard as I did, you could have done the same thing as me but that’s simply not true. There are so many factors (read Gladwell’s Outliers for a better view on how champions are made) that could yield wildly different results for each of you.
As a professional coach for so many years, my perspective was completely different. I never told a student their future was limited. I pushed them to trust the process and give it everything they had, for this was the true path to becoming a champion, regardless of whether they “made it” in terms of external rewards.
The same thing applies to writers.
Value process over results and find internally generated goals that are within your control.
No one can stop you from speaking your truth, regardless of whether you’re getting the love and attention that often comes with lots of C-word.
