A Reader’s Guide to Supporting Writers on Medium
by Tom Farr
Medium has grown into a massive network for writers to share their ideas, and while many of the writers on Medium are readers as well, it’s the hope of every writer on Medium to engage people who just enjoy reading great stories, who may not be writers themselves.
Medium isn’t just a place for writers. In fact, it’s really a place for readers to find great stories. Writers just provide those stories.
But writers on Medium want their work to be read widely, as any writer does. Writers on Medium rely on readers to get their work to spread both to readers already on Medium and readers not yet plugged into all the great stuff happening on Medium.
But many writers are struggling to find readers, and it might help for readers to know exactly how they can support writers on Medium. Below are seven key ways you can support your favorite writers on Medium.
1. Create a Profile
The first thing you can do to support writers on Medium is to become a member of the Medium community. You do this by creating a profile. In the early days of Medium, you had to have either a Twitter or Facebook account to sign into Medium, but Medium has recently instituted Email Sign-in.
Creating a profile lets writers know that real people are engaging with their content. It also allows you do to support writers in some of the other ways mentioned below.
2. Follow Writers Whose Work You Enjoy
Every writer has a profile and every post they write is attached to their profile. Following a writer whose work you enjoy ensures that their work will show up in your Medium feed the next time they post something, giving you access to their new posts.
Following a writer shows the writer that there’s a reader out there that their work engages, encouraging them to continue.
3. Follow Tags that Fit Your Interests
Most writers utilize tags for their posts so that readers who follow a certain tag will be likely to see their story.
For example, if you follow the Creative Writing tag and a writer writes a post about writing a novel with the Creative Writing tag attached, the writer’s post will be more likely to show up in the reader’s feed.
4. Follow Publications that Regularly Publish Content You’re Interested In
Writers have the option to create publications for their writing. This is a great idea if some of your content fits a certain niche. If you write about cooking a lot, but you also write about entrepreneurship, you might create a publication for all of your cooking posts. For example, I publish a serialized fiction story on Medium, but that’s not all I write, so I publish all of my posts for the fiction series in a publication.
Readers can follow publications that regularly post the type of content they’re interested in.
An added bonus for writers who run publications is the ability to interact with readers by writing Letters that are sent to all of the publication’s followers. Letters allow publications to let readers know when something new is coming.
5. Recommend Posts You Think are Exceptional
This is arguably the best way you can support a reader on Medium. A Recommend tells the reader, Medium, and other Medium users that a post is worth reading. The more Recommends a writer can get on a post, the better and the more widely the story will be spread. You can Recommend a story by clicking on the green heart symbol at the bottom of a post.
6. Share Posts You Enjoy on Social Media
Not every reader is on Medium, and not every reader knows who is a good writer on Medium. That’s where social media comes in. Word-of-mouth is still the best marketing strategy. If you share a writer’s Medium post on Twitter or Facebook, more readers are exposed to what the writer has to offer.
7. Read the Entire Post
On Medium, the number of views a writer’s story gets doesn’t matter as much as how much time a reader spends reading their post. Medium calls this the Total Time Reading metric.
One of the greatest things a reader can do for a writer on Medium is to read an entire post.
Don’t finish it if you don’t really want to, of course. When writers look at their metrics and see their number of Views is much higher than their number of Reads, it tells them they need to change something to better engage their reader.
But if you do enjoy a post, please read it until the end. And of course, the Recommend button is at the bottom of a post instead of the top for a reason.
If you enjoyed this story, please consider scrolling down and Recommending it on Medium. You can also sign up for my author newsletter here.
Tom Farr is a blogger, storyteller, and screenwriter who teaches English Language Arts to high school students. He loves creating and spending time with his wife and three children. He blogs regularly about writing and storytelling at The Whisper Project.
