We All Get Rejected on Medium
Until not so long ago (basically, until 1999), the only remotely practical way for a writer to get any audience at all was to get published in an existing, established publication. Getting an editor to accept and print your original work required some combination of writing talent, self-marketing effort and aptitude, and luck. And overcoming rejection, discouragement, and dismay. Lots and lots of rejection and dismay.
Self-publishing on a modern platform, on the other hand, is wondrous and easy. Look how perfectly our words and images are laid out, and how elegantly our names are appended, with a pithy little blurb we crafted to our own liking, just so. And no editor telling us, Try again next month, or, No I don’t need help getting my groceries in the house and it won’t get you in my magazine anyway yes I know the milk is very heavy put it down put it down don’t make me call the COPS.
But now that we can publish to our hearts’ content, why won’t more people come read? Explicit rejection from publication editors has been all too amply replaced by the implicit rejection of the masses. There are some 920,000+ Medium users (at least, that’s the number of followers I saw indicated on the official Medium account), which means that at least 919,995 people out there don’t much care for my own typical contribution, for example. Talk about rejection. Yeesh.
On the other hand, I suppose, even the most successful stories here still get rejected by 900,000+ other users, and that’s just counting Medium’s tiny stream of activity within the vaster, even more indifferent river of the Internet as a whole. Basically, the difference between any of our worst stories’ implicit rejections and anyone’s best story’s rejections is just a rounding error.
So, yeah. No point in worrying about what’s not happening; all we can reasonably do is bring our best game and see what fun there is to be had.
