SHARING AND KEEPING

Your Friends Can Eat Your Cake While You Still Get To Sell It

Or something like that

Why are you doing that? Photo of and by author

I’m sure you’ve seen this type of thing here at [redacted site name]. You may even be doing something like this yourself, but I wish you wouldn’t, because the only way any of us make any money is through paying members.

I really don’t understand why you’d not want to encourage membership, so when I came across an instance of a FOM (Friend of Medium) link recently, I asked. I got a sensible answer: the author has friends and family who don’t want to join Medium but would like to read his posts. I can’t fault that if the only stories they want to see are his. I suppose he could send them PDFs of his posts, but that’s a fair amount of work. So would emailing them a Friend Link every time you post.

I have a better idea. It comes from a Medium feature you may not be familiar with: the “unlisted” setting.

Screenshot by author

An unlisted story can be accessed by anyone with the URL, but otherwise is invisible. I use it sometimes when I want to add a lot of geeky technical detail to a story without having it appear in the story. I…