Book as organizing force for Medium authors

I’ve been pitching this privately to our publishing team and to a lot of individual authors: write articles with a book in mind.

Medium’s incentives are changing. Not instantly. Maybe you still have a year to capitalize on the current content-mill-friendly incentives. But it won’t last forever.

Also, there’s more to life than being a content mill.

The idea of a book as an organizing force is that you write a table of contents and then you write articles for each chapter or section in your table of contents.

In other words, your articles hang together. They combine into something greater, longer lasting, higher quality.

Also, thinking this way begs you to question whether what your writing is good enough. You’ll push through and do more research, more editing, more revisions.

And even more, you’ll start to get feedback from your readers and be able to work that feedback into future articles creating a positive feedback loop for quality.

Quality. You know Medium wants to reward quality. They say that. But more so, they are a subscription business. So it’s obvious — they need to give subscribers a reason to come here rather than scouring the free content everywhere else. That answer is quality.

So if you want to be a permanent fixture on this platform, you need to have a strategy for quality.