VSS365 | SUBMISSION GUIDELINES | WRITING

Revised Submission Guidelines for the VSS365 Pub

Adapting to Medium’s and Twitter’s changes

Image of grass by Alexa from Pixabay. Processed by author on Imgflip.

After Twitter/X expanded the character limit of tweets from 280 to 25,000 for Blue members the original #VSS365 idea for micro-stories/poems up to ~50 words lost much of its meaning.

Medium, from August 1, also adopted a minimum of 30" read time for visits to be considered reads.

Those changes had both benefits and drawbacks. Benefits for shorter highly engaged stories and drawbacks for long stories with weak engagement unless they are Boosted.

Engagement aside (assuming ~0) I estimated from my stories and some of others that rewards per read hour were axed by ~90%. On the flip side my rewards per 100 views of my highly engaged poems and shorts were raised 10 to 15 times or more.

For one poem I was rewarded x93 times ($2.80 instead of $0.03) for one read minute by a reader who fully engaged with me (incl. following me). Presumably statistically rare, or Medium would go bankrupt.

The point is Medium’s changes present a clear opportunity for stories and poems between 100 and 300 words but not for single haiku and <50-word stories.