Best Writing and Marketing Tools for Authors
As an author on Medium, I don’t aim for perfection — as I firmly believe perfection is the killer of invention, creativity, and sharing. Instead, I aim for the best efforts. When I’ve done my best with the resources available, I create, ship, and repeat. To aid in this simple process, I use various tools. Here, I will introduce you to my toolchest for writing and promoting my work. If you have other tools that might help in writing or promoting work, please share them in the comments.
Get Awesome, Free Cover Photos!
Every Medium article should have a great cover photo or graphic. Getting good stock photos for each article is expensive. Stock photos are also very dull. This is where the following user-contributed, royalty-free, real-world photo sharing sites come to our rescue.
unsplash.com
The built-in support for free Unsplash images on Medium is a very nifty feature. I use Unsplash so much that I decided to contribute to Unsplash. It is fantastic to see other people use my photos that are shot with a simple but amazing iPhone 11 Pro smartphone.
I highly recommend contributing back to Unsplash with any great photos that you can share with the public. They do curate photos from contributors, so not all photos will make it to the site.
pixabay.com
I have seen other authors use this resource in their articles. I have yet to try it. If Unsplash does not produce the right imagery for your article, you can try this one. Let me know how you like it. Of course, you will have to copy/paste the image URL from pixabay.com manually as Medium does not have built-in integration with this site.
Get Charts, Banners, Tables, and Dividers
Graphics is very important for illustrating a point or making an emotional connection. I am not good at freehand drawing, so I need all the help I can get to make my drawings, charts, banners, etc. look reasonably presentable.
Draw Freely with Draw.io
I love this browser-based free drawing tool for creating technical diagrams. Here is a Venn diagram I created using this excellent tool for a presentation.
I use draw.io a lot. I am fond of their Comic style of squiggly line drawing that makes boring technical diagrams a bit more exciting and fun.
Design Your Cover Image, Banners, Call-to-Actions with Canva!
For one reason or another, I have decided to stay away from Photoshop and most Adobe tools except for the Adobe PDF and Lightroom. I think I lack the patience needed to use Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. This is why I went with the much simpler online tool — Canva — for banners, covers, dividers, presentation slides, etc. It works great, but you do have to pay for many cool elements and designs. Check it out at https://www.canva.com
Here is an example of a cover image I created for an article called How to Promote Your Authors & Peeps Interview.
As you can see you can incorporate video elements and make your cover more attractive. After all who doesn’t like more cat videos, right?
Get a Real Table in 5 Minutes!
Presenting table data in your article is a bit of a challenge with Medium’s minimalist toolset. Most authors prefer to make a spreadsheet or use a presentation tool like Powerpoint or Keynotes to make a table slide and then export it as an image.
But, there is a powerful way of showing table data on Medium. It’s called Gist from Github. Here is an example of a Gist that I made on Github for an article I published in my Rocklin publication.
The beauty of a Gist is that you upload a comma value separated (CSV) file on your Github account and get a URL from them to paste on your article. Then if you ever update the data on Github.com, your table will update as well. Try Gist for free at http://gist.github.com.
Dreading the Publish Button? Call a Life-line!
As a non-native English speaker, I need all the help I can get to fix those pesky articles and punctuations that routinely run away from my keyboard. My excessive addiction to the passive voice is a life-sucking illness. And don’t get me started with the split infinitives. I use them like I am playing Fruit Ninja with my six-year-old boy.
With over 25 years of immersion in American English, I still need to untangle my written words. Even though my dreams are also in English, I always write and rewrite to appeal to the target reading level.
The most recent national assessment of adult literacy showed that 93 million (43%) of American adults have Basic or Below Basic literacy skills. General public, reads at the 8th grade level. Most people appreciate quick, concise information written in everyday language.
This is where the following tools come very handy.
Grammarly to the Rescue!
A lifesaver for any author. Using their Chrome plugin and a paid subscription, you can dish out a lot of content faster with reasonably fewer errors and omissions.
Hemingway Editor
This one is an exciting tool. I don’t always use it, but it analyzes your writing and gives you a ton of insights. Here is a screenshot showing the analysis of the text in this section.
Reaching Your Audience
Medium is relatively new in the publishing world. I routinely run into people who have never heard of it. Since I have decided to focus my online writing on this beautiful platform-network, I need to introduce Medium to people as much as I need them to see my work.
In this effort, I have identified some tools to help.
Apple iTunes Podcast
The power of the podcast is fantastic. It is a great tool for authors.
There are a lot of people who are driving, working out in gyms, riding on subways and public transportations that can listen to your stories.
I think every author should have their podcast and, if possible, record their stories in their voice. I remember listening to my favorite non-fiction author, Malcolm Gladwell, and instantly becoming a fan. I purchased every book he has ever written, and I listen to his awesome podcast called the Revisionist History while I am walking, running, or driving.
However, this can be a time-consuming venture. So I decided to investigate this further and decided to create a semi-automated solution for my publication: Authors & Peeps.
You can access my semi-automated podcast for this publication at https://mediumauthor.com/podcast
When it comes to the podcast, you have a few choices (a) you can record your voice and create the audio files yourself (b) you can generate the audio files using a service such as the Play.ht, which is what I used for my experiment.
Once you have the audio files, you need artwork and metadata details such as title, category, genre, length of recording, etc. and put together an Apple iTunes readable RSS feed, which is described here. Or you can utilize a third-party company such as Buzzsprout, Captivate, Transistor, Simplecast, Podbean, Castos, etc. Some of them have limited free accounts that give you 2–5 hours of storage with 100–250 GB of bandwidth. The rest are pretty pricey.
I like podcasts a lot, but I think paying $12 to $49/month for the podcast is a bit too much for aspiring and upcoming authors who are trying to build an audience. Now that I know the guts of the technology involved in creating the podcast and serving them through Apple Podcast services, my team and I are working on building an affordable solution as part of our upcoming Author Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. If you are interested in my forthcoming solution, shoot me an email at tools@mediumauthor.com, and I will inform you about our progress and beta programs.
Authors and Peeps Chrome Plugin
I also decided to create a few tools for helping me and, hopefully, other authors in the future with audience development and other misc productivity items.
My Chrome plugin is in internal beta testing. Here are two video clips showing how it helps with following people with just 1–2 clicks.
Here is how it helps me with my followers vs. the following ratio and allows me to remove all or selected people from my following list.
I am working on a few other tools and will soon make them available to the public in the coming months.
Want to Chat with Other Authors and Fans?
I read that Medium’s founder, Ev Williams, envisions the Medium as more of a network than a publishing tool. I agree with him. It has been a much better engagement experience than anything else I have tried so far.
By design, Medium is minimalist, and so there is no way for authors to chat with each other beyond tagging along in comment sections.
I created a Telegram channel for authors and readers. I hope you will join to have meaningful conversations with each other.
Join the telegram channel at https://mediumauthor.com/telegram.
Got Social Media?
Pundits say use social media to spread your messaging. Frankly, I haven’t paid much attention to this advice.
I am not a big fan of Facebook or Twitter or even LinkedIn. My experience with Twitter has been really poor.
I found twitter to be suitable for folks who have a lot of announcements or sound bytes to share. Building an audience on twitter has been a fail for me. I have yet to learn the tricks of the trade.
LinkedIn seems to be a place where you can cross-post articles. I haven’t tried that yet. However, my past LinkedIn experience is also very poor. I found people in the insurance, recruiting, and marketing industries to be very engaged in LinkedIn. Also, the user experience of LinkedIn seems so corporate-ish that I don’t find it appealing to my taste.
I have some excellent experiences with Instagram for non-writing work. I have to explore how to use Instagram for audience building for online publishing work. Authors with books can show off their books, record video clips, and use popular hashtags to increase their discoverability.
Cross-Posting on an External Website
If you have a personal website or a blog, you might want to consider cross-posting your articles on both your website and Medium.
SEO and social media wizards are now using Medium as a redistribution network. They post original content on their own optimized sites and then rerun it on Medium for more exposure. This cheapens the brand. It’s similar to the syndication model that basic cable relies on. Medium’s no longer the HBO of online publishing platforms. Now it’s TBS. — Theo Miller (Forbs Contributor)
If you do go this route, make sure to read the following article by Medium regarding how to set the canonical link so that search engines know which version (your site version or the Medium version) of a post is authoritative.
YouTube Channel for Medium Authors
I am surprised that there aren’t any YouTube channels dedicated to Medium authors. So I would love to create a channel and offer authors a way to promote their writing using interviews and discussions. I am working on this idea.
I have covered a few existing tools and a few tools that I am working on at the moment. Let me know what you think about all this, and if you are interested in beta testing my tools, please email me at beta@mediumauthor.com.
