Will Changes to the Medium Partner Plan Make Writers Pad their Work?

I’m excited about the new Partner Plan payments, but will it lead to more fluff?

Reading a 17-minute article about anything requires a dedicated window of time. This isn’t a quick skim on your phone, or a scroll between meetings. Long stories require more time to write and more time from the reader.

With read time being the only metric for which we’ll get paid, starting 10/28/19, I hope this doesn’t lead to a new boom in over-wordy, content-stuffed stories, just to retain eyeballs.

There’s nothing that angers me more than a book that could’ve told me the butler did it sixty-five pages earlier. The same holds true with articles. You said it three times already. Did you really need to say it again?

I believe there’s a better way to engage people. And I hope more writers will agree.

While there’s plenty of room for long-form stories (the kind where the author spent weeks on the research and there’s a clear reason for the long content), I believe the best way to keep your audience returning to your work is to continue to provide them with good writing — no matter the length.

Yes, I’m speculating.

I realize Medium has put a lot of thought into this new payment practice. I think the new way will be better than the current way. I also understand human behavior. Every writer will want her piece of the readerly-pie.

…and I believe there will be an instant spike in mega-stories.

One sentence will become seven. One paragraph becomes three pages.

If this happens too much, we’ll disenfranchise the readers. Not everyone wants short content. Not everyone wants long. But those who climb into a long story, assuming their time will be well-spent, could be in for a fluff-shock if writers aren’t careful about their intentions.

I guess this is a plea to writers.

If you wrote long-form content before, keep it up. If you wrote shorter pieces before — well — keep writing shorter pieces. Don’t change your style and pad your work just to make an extra buck.

We don’t know how this new landscape will shake-out, but writing more than you should is never the answer.

Most of my stories are on the shorter side.

I don’t have the bandwidth for longer content. I like to make my point and go home. Maybe you feel the same way. I also appreciate the writers who put in the hours to write the 20–30 minute stories. Some of the best writing I’ve read in a long time.

Those folks need to keep writing long stories. We need them.

Fluff won’t make you money over the long-haul. It will lose readers who got angry after wasting a half-hour of their lives over a point that could’ve been made in five minutes.

It’s like most of the business books at the airport — the NYT bestsellers. Most of those books started as articles (and should’ve stayed there).

Well, we aren’t airport writers.

We do work that matters for readers who care.

Let’s keep creating great content for the people we serve, at a length appropriate for the point we’re trying to make. I believe that’s the best way to keep our readers coming back. You can only ‘pad’ someone so many times before they start ignoring your work.

We’re waiting for you.

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August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to create work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.