The Help of Strangers

New to online media, I quickly learned a story simply dropped in Medium’s forest isn’t read.

I always have loved to write. Besides the data science topics, like how to Reopen Safely (Apr 2020), I also occasionally write small stories. A few times it’s been poems. But it didn’t take long to get humbled. There’s nothing like writing a small story, pushing it out, and then seeing it has been read zero times after a full week..

Then another week and still read zero times.

I’m not sure what I was thinking — I figured that either Medium’s curation or some search engine type thing would pick it up and I’d start to get some occasional hits. But no. There were literally zero hits and then it was not picked up for curation. It would have been easy to get a little down about this but I was more curious. I’m new — I expected there would be some learning to do. Meanwhile I would see these “publications” on Medium — what was that about?

Going back to my Medium Beginnings

The Medium onboarding process — if you can even call it that — is pretty sparse. Other than dropping into a text editor with the encouraging “New Story” blank page — the platform itself doesn’t really help new writers get started. Occasionally I’d see posts by other writers talking about how they got their first 800 followers by just commenting, or how they only got 4 of their first 7 articles curated, or how to make you pick a good image for your piece. I started adding pictures to my articles. I didn’t see any mention of Unsplash — I learned about that by accident later.

Then there were some of the writers I saw in my feed, like Umair Haque and his 153k followers. Clearly he’s a good writer and he’s found a niche with his apocalypse genre. But how to even get close? How to be heard? I looked at my profile. Two months in my 4 articles had garnered me 15 followers — all of them through an external campaign related to COVID19 data modeling. Even though I had few followers, links from a non-Medium campaign resulted in a few hundred views. But as soon as that campaign was done the views largely stopped. Only then is when I started to explore the Medium platform in earnest. With so few followers I was the equivalent of a Medium ghost.

That’s when I started to realize Medium isn’t a flat publishing platform with automatic curation for the magical few but a platform for creating publications. Part of my confusion was that Medium would put stories from mainstream pubs like The Atlantic on the homepage. So in my outsider’s view my little articles would have to compete with the likes of professionally created and marketed mainstream publications. This was something I wasn’t going to put time into competing with.

Then a funny thing happened. Somehow drifting through my feed I realized that there were literally hundreds of Medium publications and that they were created by people from all walks of life. I suppose that’s what happens when Medium’s a hobby. I wrote a couple of non data science stories. Now that they weren’t picked up and I started to read about these other publications I realized that those pubs had readership. I need to be on those if I wanted even single digit readership for my simple pieces. But how to join?

I tried to join a couple publications, carefully reading their guidelines, but I didn’t hear back. Again, I could have missed something in the application process / draft submittal process. That’s when I found a few publications looking for writers and willing to help. The first was The POM edited by Christina Ward. I submitted to the POM a small poem and it was accepted. I didn’t really think much about it until I went to the POM and for a moment, The Blue Egg was top article. It started to get hits and comments! No I wasn’t earning lots of money (It still hasn’t cracked a lifetime dollar) but at least it was there and being read. The second was Illumination edited by Mehmet Yildiz. I submitted to Illumination and was welcomed. Thank you. In Illumination I saw a vibrant growing and welcoming community which accepted Embrace. More importantly both editors gave some tips and comments on the process including linking social media.

The other thing I learned was that commenting (thoughtfully) on other’s articles really makes a difference in drawing people to your own work. It’s such an easy thing to leave a thoughtful comment to other authors. It builds strength and garners good feedback on your own works. I’m now a little wary of authors who have 2000+ followers and follow less than 10. Where’s the feedback cycle in that?

In any case my journey on Medium is new and I appreciate being a part of the community. With the help of strangers some of my works are now more widely read than before and I look forward to writing and reading more on the platform. Bless you all.