Making Money On Medium

BlytheWood
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

Otherwise Known As The Difference Between Me And Stephen King

Photo by Julie Johnson on Unsplash

Q: What’s the difference between me and Stephen King?

A: He didn’t get paid for his first stories, but I did.

Ha ha, so you know I have my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I don’t for one single minute think I have any one-upmanship on Stephen King, I just though it might be a good opening line.

It feels pretty great to be truthful. I joined Medium one week ago and have made the sum total of $1.23, which is amazing.

I’m still trying to figure out how it works. I assumed it was based on claps, but it seems to be payment based on fans. Either way, the purpose of writing for Medium isn’t about earning cart loads of cash, though of course that would be an enormous boon. It’s about creating a daily work ethic, it’s about becoming disciplined to write something every day. It’s about using the environment around me to be inspired and to be able to play with and assemble words in a (hopefully) clever, coherent way.

It doesn’t matter to me if I don’t make very much, because what I am gaining is some sort of daily order and a record of all the things that move me.

For fourteen years between the ages of 12 and 26 I kept a daily journal. It traveled across continents with me, a meter stack of scruffy exercise books. I honestly don’t think I missed a day writing, in 14 years. These books contained snippets of a boyfriend’s hair, my bunny rabbit’s toenails, a bit of chewed gum and all kinds of secrets and confessions. The diaries detailed the first time I kissed someone, the first time I had sex, moving 12 000 miles across the world and months and months of depression as a result.

The year after turning 26, I set fire to them all. In the past 21 years I haven’t missed being a daily journal writer, but I have missed writing daily and having the discipline to follow through with creative tasks.

So, am I going to make a lot of money on Medium, using regained focus and daily direction? Who knows? But what I think I’ll gain is so much more.

And if you want to become my fan, please do so. But if not, thanks for reading this far.

BlytheWood
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