Can You Write a Book, Chapter by Chapter on Medium?

There’s nothing stopping you, but is it a good idea?

Melinda Crow
Breakout Writing
Published in
4 min readNov 25, 2019

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The short answer regarding writing an entire book in pieces on Medium is yes, you can. The Medium platform lends itself well to any form of writing.

Medium’s most fundamental function is simply as a place to write. It’s your choice what you do with that.

Having said that, there are deeper questions to examine.

Curation

If your goal is to have Medium’s curators promote your chapters to a larger audience, you have to follow their guidelines, which include the fact that they don’t typically curate serialized stories. Here’s the guideline:

Serialization: Stories that are split into multiple posts are unlikely to be curated unless each post works on its own without additional context

So unless each chapter can stand entirely on its own, you’re not getting help with the promotion of your individual book chapters. That would seem to work well for carefully-written non-fiction, but poses challenges for fiction.

Writing a non-fiction book article by article is actually an approach often used by bloggers on their own platforms, so doing it on Medium also makes sense.

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Melinda Crow
Breakout Writing

30-year freelancer. Found on: Newsweek, The Points Guy, Cruise Critic, MSN Travel, Writing Cooperative. Falcon Guide author. https://melindacrow.substack.com/