What Are the Hidden Benefits of Joining Publications on Medium?

Some of you might not know this. If you do, feel free to feel smug and tell me I’m stating the obvious

Way back when in September, I wrote a kind of beginner’s guide to Medium publications. I had weeks of experience to share with you lucky people.

I was kind of ambivalent about publications at this point. I was starting to lean towards self-publishing on the site because I wasn’t sure I was getting any real benefit from jumping through publication hoops.

I’ve kind of changed my mind.

Since then, I’ve tried out multiple publications — big and small — and have seen some tangible benefits from putting my articles in some of them.

But, before I write about that, let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s set the scene of my skewed expectations in case you’re deluded enough to share them.

I know a few people who used Medium in the past. All of them told me to publish in publications and not to self-publish. Most of them waxed lyrical about the sense of community you got from using publications.

This is the expectation I had. I thought that publications were like NCT/post-natal Mum groups. I imagined that we’d all get together over a cup of tea and biscuits, show off our article babies and make cooing and supportive engagement noises.

Not sure why that was attractive to me. I work for myself for a reason (I’m fairly anti-social and I don’t like groups) and I left my NCT baby group after two meet-ups because I hated everyone in it.

Anyhow.

Most publications don’t work this way. You do get a relevant home for an article, but other writers in the publication aren’t likely to put the kettle on and look at your baby.

So, after a few tries, I was a bit disappointed in the results. It was kind of like I’d turned up for a social meet-up too late when everyone had gone home. Or, they’d changed the venue and not told me.

I was looking at this the wrong way.

When you publish, the algorithm decides who sees your articles. It might show your stuff to some people who are interested in your subject tags. But, your stuff mainly floats around your own follower network if you self-publish.

If you’re trying to grow an organic reading following, then you already know that making progress is like wading through treacle that is so slow it makes normal treacle look speedy.

So, if you’re lucky, you might attract a new reader here and there. But, you miss out on feed visibility.

If you use publications, then you tap into their following feeds. If someone follows a publication, all its articles appear in their feeds. Your article gets a wider reach. Doesn’t mean more people will read it. But, at least it gets in front of more potential readers.

So, if a publication has 1,000 followers, then anything you put in it is distributed to the feeds of these 1,000 readers. They have a specific interest in the publication.

Some might even read what you write. Your treacle wade might speed up a tiny tad. You could add followers who are actually interested in your articles. Because, let’s face it, most followers couldn’t give a flying doo-dah about reading your stuff.

And, then there is the Boost angle. Lots of writers think that you have to be boosted by a qualifying publication editor; however, this isn’t true.

Medium also makes internal boosts. I’ve moaned about this a bit in the past. I didn’t think it worked. Then, Ariel Meadow Stallings caught me moaning in a comment exchange.

Ariel is Medium’s Director of Publisher Growth. She’s around the site in comments more than any other staffer and she manages the Boost pilot program. For all I know, she is also Director of Managing Moany Writers.

She explained a bit more about the process. She told me that that the internal curation team boosts just as many articles as publication editors — it’s a 50/50 split at the moment.

She also pointed me to a useful article on how the site’s publishing system works (I’ll stick a link in at the end of this — it explains a lot if you’ve never read it before. Take a look at its flowchart thingy).

As far as I can tell, you do have a fighting chance of getting boosted even if a publication editor doesn’t select you. However, you have to get enough traction from the algorithm to get noticed by one of the internal Medium boosters.

They can’t possibly read everything we publish every day. So, your article has to be algorithmically ranked highly enough to reach the step of human curation.

You might not get this ranking if you solely self-publish. I don’t know exactly how the algorithm’s secret squirrel sauce mix works. But, I do think that getting new readers from a publication’s following feed can’t do any harm.

If your stuff is being read by new people and more people, then you are more likely to rank higher. This is the kind of stuff that most algorithms notice and act on.

So, nobody’s going to give you a biscuit for joining a publication (pretty please, Smillew, I like KitKats). But, you might just get some new feed readers and improve your chances of an internal Boost.

Here’s a link to my original article on publications/self-publishing. It still has (I think) some useful information if you aren’t sure which route to take.

And, here’s the Medium article I mentioned: