Editor Newsletter: How do you take a story from good to great?
May 2025
Hi editors,
What’s your editing process? How do you take a story from good to great for your publication? And why do you do it? Leave a response on this story to tell me more! I’m featuring some best practices in an upcoming newsletter.
I’m asking because I know first-hand how important editors are, which is why one of my favorite Medium features is the draft link. I rarely publish a story without getting a second pair of eyes on it first. We writers are close to our work, and that closeness means it’s tough to be objective. Is a piece too fluffy? Does the title need a rethink? How did that typo sneak in there, anyway?
These are the questions I know you ask your writers all the time. Reply to this email to share your process!
More on today’s menu:
- Some behind-the-scenes pub stats
- Draft Day 2025 Wrapped
- A retro of new publication features
Stats & shoutouts
- 772: New-to-Medium writers published in publications last month
- 53k: stories submitted to publications last month
- 43,000,000+: How many times stories in publications were presented in the For You section on the homepage to readers last month
And here are a few new Medium pubs I loved that launched just this month:
- Maratonton, a publication in Indonesian that publishes movie and series reviews for binge-watching. I love that people from all around the world come to Medium to share their opinions on all kinds of things!
- Parenting Real Talk, a publication where parents share the funny and messy side of raising kids.
Draft Day 2025: Wrapped
If you participated in this year’s Draft Day, either as a writer/participant or as an editor/coach, thank you! We had a great time hosting it, and we’re already looking forward to making next year bigger and better.
Here were a few quotes I loved from some of the editors who attended and spoke at Draft Day:
“Thank you, writer and editor community, and also to all the Medians who showed up with great positivity.” — , editor of The Narrative Arc
“To sum up, Draft Day was like the hop-on, hop-off bus tour — come by when you want, stay for as long as you want, and leave when you want.” — , editor of Namaste Now
“It takes guts to go back to something unfinished and say, ‘I’m ready to bring this to life,’ and we couldn’t be prouder of this community.” — , editor of ENGAGE
Some (more) stats to share:
- 24 publications sponsored Draft Day 2025 to help us get the word out and coach their writers over the finish line. If that was you, thank you!
- Over 350 people joined to publish over 500 drafts. That’s over 3x as many as last year!
- 500 writers and editors showed up to the webinar. Of those, 34 were there the whole time. We love you, whoever you are!
- Did you catch the blue “Draft Day 2025” topic tag (you can see it at the bottom of any story with that topic tag)? It took 4 hours and 34 minutes to take that from an idea to live on Medium.com. Thanks to our engineers who made that happen!
And I’m not done with the shoutouts, either. To our Draft Day 2025 sponsors:
Namaste Now!, Paper Poetry, Pythoneers, The Narrative Arc, The Little Recipe, Person on the Page, Restless Quills, The Echoes of India, My Fair Lighthouse, Identity Current, Sweary Mommy, Runner’s Life, Wise & Well, Microbial Instincts, The Riff, The Heritage Pub, The Quantastic Journal, Books Are Our Superpower, Thirty Over Fifty, Science Spectrum, Nursing Notes, Hope, Healing, and Humor, Engage, and Beloved
A huge and heartfelt thank you. Draft Day 2025 would not have been what it is without you.
To the editors who spoke with Scott Lamb about their publications: from The Narrative Arc, from The Quantastic Journal, from The Riff, from Nursing Notes, from Identity Current, from Restless Quills, from Echoes of India, from Wise & Well, from Science Spectrum, from Hope, Healing, and Humor, from My Fair Lighthouse, and from Sweary Mommy.
We so appreciate you taking the time to share your publication with us and the writers at Draft Day 2025.
A retrospective on the last year of publications
In the last year, we’ve made a few changes to publications. Some of my favorite new additions have been:
- Featured Stories. Publications can Feature four stories every week to promote them to their followers. Shortly after, we launched Push notifications and the Featured feed for Featured stories. Around 15k stories have been Featured since we launched!
- Publication visibility. When readers are reading a story that’s been published in a publication, the publication sidebar persists before slowly fading as the reader scrolls down. This resulted in an increase to readers following a publication.
- Time last updated. At the bottom of every story in a pub, you can now see when that publication last published a story.
- New stats for publication editors. This brought the stats that editors see in line with the stats writers get.
You may have also received an email recently about how we’ve improved publication newsletter deliverability. Previously, subscribers wouldn’t get publication emails if they became inactive on Medium for a certain period of time. Now, your publication’s newsletter goes out to all of your existing subscribers.
Want to know what’s coming next? Keep your eyes on your inbox. In the next few weeks, we’ll be announcing a bigger change. This one won’t affect your publication much, but behind the scenes, we’ve been working on a big project to improve the underlying publication infrastructure on Medium. We hope it’ll mean more improvements to publications at a faster rate in the future.
Thanks, as always, for your work to build communities on Medium.
Happy editing!
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P.S. These newsletters are sent as emails to editors on Medium every month. We are adding them as Medium stories to allow more responses and easy viewing between editions.
