Is Your Medium Curation Drought Getting You Down?
The real question is whether you get back up
You’ve just finished your next masterpiece. You click ‘Submit’. It now sits with a publication. You’ve got some time to twiddle your thumbs until it gets accepted. It does. Nice job.
You wait until it gets published, while desperately praying to the Writing Gods that it gets off to a good start. (They aren’t listening yet.)
Now the real test begins.
You know, that time-ticking wait that agonizes you — the one that drains every ounce of mental energy you had in you, the one that forces you to keep refreshing your emails with the hope that your friends from Medium might like your work.
10 minutes goes by…
You decide it might be worth distracting yourself. You check your ‘Stats’ page, which of course you decide to refresh first.
The numbers are slightly disheartening. You remind yourself it’s still early days before your story gathers momentum.
In the meantime, still nothing in your inbox.
You give it another hour.
Hang on. Wasn’t there that one time when you received a curation email much later on in the day? Oh yeah, there was.
You feel reassured with the possibility that maybe there’s just a backlog of published work for Medium to get through first.
8 hours later…
You realise how unproductive you’ve been.
10 hours later…
You start to lose hope.
But wait, suddenly you remember it’s possible to check whether your story was ‘Not distributed in topics’ somewhere in your Medium account.
I mean, surely it’s better to know than to not. But why does it still keep saying this?!
We are processing this story. Hang tight!Oh great, now you’ve created a third page to keep refreshing.
Hours start to go by, now days.
Now you are into week 2. And you know it’s week 2 because Medium tells you it can take up to 2 weeks for your work to be reviewed.
But by then, you know it’s game over. You know your story didn’t get curated.
You give up.
Sound familiar?
I was off to a flying start when I first joined Medium.
One month in, I’d written 8 pieces, 3 of which got curated and 1 of which was double-curated. Not bad, right?
I mean, who wouldn’t be impressed with a curation-ratio of 37.5%? So yeah, I was pretty damn pleased with myself.
In fact, it didn’t take long before I was convinced that if I just kept going for a couple more months, I’d hit ‘Top Writer’ status, reach 10k followers, and make some serious bucks in a matter of no time. Easy.
Oh, how wrong I was.
If what I just described to you is remotely relatable, I recommend you try the following:
Grab a baseball bat, take a big swing, and aim for that massive chip bulging out of your shoulder.
Seriously, snap out of it.
You are nowhere near the apex of the mountain. You are not a ‘Top Writer’. You do not have 10k followers. And you have not made more dollars than your wallet has space for.
Ah, now that felt good to say.
So here’s the truth: after my 8th piece, I went through a curation drought.
I’ve published 10 additional stories over the last 3 weeks. I’d safely describe some of these as being my best work yet — even better than what was once curated. And not a single one of them was good enough for Medium’s editors. My curation ratio has now collapsed to near 15%. I’ve got no idea whether this is above/below average but it still feels like a let-down.
And truth be told, I’m starting to miss that fuzzy feeling of waking up to:
“Hi there,
Our curators just read your story, [Insert story title], that you submitted for review.
Based on its quality, they selected it to be recommended to readers interested in [Insert tag(s)] across our homepage, app, topic page, and emails…
Thanks for writing,
Your friends at Medium”
Rest assured, I’ve got your back. Below, I present to you a sure-fire way to cure that sinking feeling of rejection when you aren’t greeted by Medium’s editors — *correction* — when I’m not greeted by Medium’s editors.
Disclaimer: what I’m about to tell you might not work.
‘A hopeless guide on how to get your stories curated by Medium’
You see, as much as you might think I am the sacred holder of a powerful recipe that will end your dry spell (I’m genuinely flattered!), something unfortunate happened.
Two burglars — named Practice and Perseverance — broke into my home, cracked open my safe and stole said recipe, leaving everything else untouched.
What a bizarre occurrence.
Anyways, they were, however, kind enough to leave a little note behind, scribbled with the following:
- Write more
- Write better
- Tag more
- Tag better
- Do all of the above, more.
Such kind burglars!
The truth is, nobody has the magic formula to guarantee Medium curation for your next piece. Yes, it would be helpful if you read the guidelines from time to time, but other than that, you have to leave it up to the ‘Gods of Medium’. Only they hold the sword that decides the fate of your story.
That said, here is what’s helped me come to terms with the fact that I may never be able to match my 37.5% curation-ratio ever again, or at least for the foreseeable future.
Good writing deserves curation, good writers don’t
The reason I felt like I hit rock bottom when I lost my curation streak wasn’t that I thought my writing deserved to be curated.
It was because I was convinced that I deserved to be curated.
In fact, most of us will probably feel like this at some point.
A few short-lived moments of success somehow trickle their way into our brains. They feed us the ‘poison of ego’, reminding us how awesome we are, reassuring us that whatever we write next will always be worthy of praise.
But really, this mindset simply detracts us from the inherent need to put in the hard work.
Writers become good writers because they produce good writing. And they produce good writing because they keep writing.
Notice how curation never played any role in the sentence above.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that your next piece will always be distributed further because, well, you as a writer should always be distributed further (whatever on earth that means).
But you need to remind yourself that your story will be curated if your writing is good, not if you are good at writing.
Give every article you publish your best efforts. That’s all you can really do.
Curation is what you desire, not what you need
The hardest part about not being curated is coming to terms with the fact that what you want isn’t going to be handed to you on a silver platter.
But do you really need it? Does your work really need to be curated?
Sure, it helps generate a few more dollars. And yes, a well-distributed piece that finds its way into readers’ inboxes might bring you a few more followers along the way.
But unless you joined Medium for the fame or the money, you don’t need to be curated.
Curation is a nice-to-have, not a necessity.
What you need to do is:
- Keep writing
- Keep reading
- Keep submitting to publications
- Keep getting rejected, and then submitting to more publications
- Keep doing all of the above
- But most importantly, keep writing.
Final thought
Have I told you anything new? Nope.
You knew this all along.
All I did was remind you to keep your head on straight so that you can keep writing through the inevitable disappointments.
And yes, I also know I won’t get curated for this piece since Medium doesn’t curate stories about Medium.
But that doesn’t bother me anymore.
So ask yourself this. How will you spend your time when Medium doesn’t curate your stories?
I certainly know how I’m going to spend mine.
