TOTALLY TRUE

This Will Make You Feel Better About Not Getting Boosted

Only I could have an article boosted and manage to get a failure story out of it!

It’s probably my fault for writing so many failure stories. Maybe the universe took note and decided to provide me with more material.

First, the good news. I finally got a story boosted. Yes, I did. And I was so excited I could barely sleep that night. I kept waking up to see if hundreds of people had read it.

I have been known to spout Taoist wisdom about not getting attached to outcome. Maybe the universe decided to test me. Spoiler alert: I failed. But there is a bigger failure to come . . .

There I was, not sleeping, mentally spending the cash. Perhaps I would get enough to buy a flight to go and see my number 3 egg in Sydney. No, don’t be silly. That would be too much to ask for. I reined myself in.

Perhaps I would get $100 and be able to afford half-a-head of hair colour.

I restrained myself from checking the stats for 24 hours. I wanted to give it a good chance to climb. First, I want to show you what I expected to happen:

The picture above is what everyone expects when they get boosted: a sharp increase in views and reads. It is the screenshot of what happened to Roz Warren, Writing Coach when she got boosted. You can read her story here.

Now, look at a screenshot of what happened when I got boosted. The little yellow dot at the top of the hill shows when the boost was applied. It’s come out a bit small, but it does say Boosted there.

Honestly! Only I could get boosted and have my stats tank. You are allowed to laugh at this. I’d like it if you laughed. I sure did.

This is a true screenshot, by the way. I haven’t done any clever editing. I wouldn’t know how. It took me an hour to figure out how to write “big increase” and “big decrease”. And it took me two hours on Canva to get some text onto the photo of the mutant mouse my sister made. Altering a graph is way beyond my skill set.

I have no idea how or why the story was chosen. I hadn’t been “trying” to get nominated. I hadn’t sought out a publication with a boost nominator. I self-published. The piece even mentioned Medium and had the word “fuck” in it. I wrote it for fun.

But there is a lesson here. And I think you will like it if you are a human writer rather than an AI bot operator.

I have been on Medium for just over two years. And I have built up a readership slowly and organically. In my first month, I made 21 cents. In my second month, I made $1.33. Followers, readers and earnings grew slowly over time.

I persevered.

And the way I make sense of why my stats plummeted after the boost is this: the story was published on January 30th. Because my followers are so lovely, they had all read it by the time the story got boosted on February 2nd.

Here is the takeaway:

• You have zero control over whether you get boosted.
• You DO have control over your ability to persevere and build a loyal audience slowly.

And isn’t it absolutely, gob-smackingly amazing that if you do the latter, even if you are semi-educated and have never done a writing course in your life, you can get to a stage where you can forget all about the Medium boost programme? You can let go of the desire because your loyal readers will give you a boost every time you write something with heart and passion, or just for fun.

I hope this makes you feel better if you haven’t been boosted.

I hope it makes you feel empowered.

In case you are interested, this is the one that got the boost. But my guess is that anyone reading this has already seen it. And can I just say thank you for that one more time? THANK YOU. I’m not going to tag you all. I hate group tags. You know who you are. You are the one reading this. And I love you.