Where Do Big Medium Authors Publish?

I looked at 10 huge authors on Medium and analyzed their publishing habits

There’s a lot of conjecture about the best strategies to become successful on the Medium platform. One great way to discover those strategies is by seeing what the already-successful authors do.

And potentially applying the same strategies to yourself.

So today I sat down and researched 10 big authors on Medium, all with 30,000 to 200,000 followers.

I won’t name any names here, as I don’t want to ruffle anyone's feathers.

Also, I’m allergic to feathers.

<Shudders>

Methodology

This isn’t scientific by any means, but it is a collection of some potentially useful habits that the big boys and girls use on Medium.

I first looked at the 10 most recent stories they published. I then also searched for some of their most-clapped articles over the years.

Some commonalities definitely showed up, and I’ll talk about that at the end.

But first, here are the pure statistics from the 200 data points I collected.

The 10 most recent articles of the 10 authors had the following frequency of publications:

1. Mind Cafe — 19%
2. Self-owned publication with only the author’s material — 17%
3. Self-published — 11%
4. Better Marketing — 11%
5. Post Grad Survival Guide — 9%
6. Human Parts — 8%
7. Personal Growth — 8%
8. PS I Love You — 7%
9. Forge (Medium owned publication) — 5%
10. The Startup — 3%
11. Publishous — 2%

Where 10 of the best-performing articles for each author were published (ones with over 10,000 claps):

1. Self-published — 17%
2. Self-owned publication with only the author’s material — 13%
3. Mission.org — 11%
4. Forge (Medium owned publication)— 10%
5. PS I Love You — 9%
6. The Startup — 8%
7. Personal Growth — 8%
8. Better Marketing — 6%
9. Mind Cafe — 5%
10. Human Parts — 4%
11. Publishous — 3%
12. Post Grad Survival Guide — 2%
13. Better Humans — 2%
14. Elemental (Medium owned publication) — 1%
15. Live Your Life On Purpose — 1%

Some Interesting Tidbits I Noticed

There were several common factors across the 10 authors I looked at. Perhaps these can be some good takeaways for you to apply to your own approach to Medium.com.

1. Half of the authors had their own publication that only contained their stories

The great advantage of having your own publication (assuming you can gain a decent following), is that you are able to send out an email directly to the followers— say, with your new articles once a week or something like that.

This is currently the only way for you to have direct access to the readers on Medium.

Otherwise, you depend on another publication/editor choosing your work or the random chance of your followers seeing your article pop up in their feed out of the thousands of stories published each day.

2. 60% of the authors self-published at least occasionally (within the selected data)

There are a couple of benefits to self-publishing on the platform, and it appears some of the big authors still aim for that.

The biggest benefit I know of is when you self-publish (and simultaneously get curated), the big Medium owned publications have a chance at reaching out to you for that piece.

They won’t (often) do this if your work is published in a publication, even if its a small one. They rightfully don’t want to step on any toes.

3. Of the recent articles, ALL (but 1) of the authors published in only 1–3 publications outside of their personal ones

Perhaps this is a sign of being a veteran on Medium, but I found it very interesting that none of the authors published in more than 3 outside publications in their recent history.

I suppose they go with what works. After all, if an editor likes your style of work, there’s a much better chance they’ll publish your new stuff again.

How can we apply that to ourselves? Well, if you haven’t gained a lot of traction yet, I would explore getting into as many different publications as possible. Ones applicable to your writing style and topics.

Here’s a great resource for those exploring other publications to get accepted into:

After you try, try, try again for many different publications, you’ll eventually (hopefully) get in the groove with one or two of them.

That’s when you can/should apply the same strategy as the big writers.

4. Strategies

One writer only wrote in their own publications, almost exclusively.

Another writer purely self-publishes or writes for the Medium owned Forge publication.

The rest of them seemed to have a comfortable mix between semi-related publications that flow really well with those writers’ niches.

That gives us a couple of avenues to pursue if you’re really serious about this Medium game that we all love to play.

Takeaways

I imagine if I had extended the number of authors I researched, we’d probably continue to find that most of them have their own publication, self publish occasionally, and focus on 1–3 other publications, repeatedly.

This seems like a reasonable formula of success — but not necessarily a way to get there.

I’ve read before — from a long-term author on this platform — that it used to be much easier to accumulate followers on a publication.

Sadly, that’s no longer the case, for the most part.

So whether you choose to self-publish or create your own publication with only your stories — it's up for debate which one will work better going forward on Medium.

As for myself, I’ll be pursuing both strategies in the coming months — because, hey, why the hell not?

Thanks for reading, I hope this little data dive can be useful!

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J.J. Pryor

If you enjoyed this article — even an infinitesimal amount, then I’d wager a block of French moldy cheese that you’ll like the below stories in Feedium (J.J. Pryor’s pub) as well: