Author’s Note (July 2020): When I wrote this post five years ago, I included something that I can no longer support, which is the idea that writing for free is a gateway to building a career. You can read more about why I changed my mind here, but the rest of this piece is still relevant. Additionally, you can read my most recent tips for fiction writers on Medium here.If you’re a fiction writer, Medium may feel like a place you can go to for practical tips and encouragement about writing and networking among many other practical ideas on a variety of topics, but it may not feel like a place for publishing your latest short story.
But Medium is a rapidly growing network that’s perfect for fiction and nonfiction writers alike who haven’t quite found their audience yet.
Medium is a network that’s particularly suited for writers who take their writing seriously because Medium wants people to find their audience. While you probably aren’t going to go viral right out of the gate or even several months in, if you write content that people want to read, you’ve got a good shot at having your work appear in front of a lot of people.
While Medium seems to be used predominantly by nonfiction writers, here are four reasons why fiction writers should be utilizing Medium.
1. Medium Streamlines Writing
Medium’s simple design frees writers to do just that. The formatting tools are minimal and they’re incredibly intuitive. It’s easy to add pictures, headlines, links, and embedded web content. With Medium, what you see is what you get, and the design looks fantastic.
Just write and use Medium’s super-easy formatting tools to have your post ready to publish in no time.
I’ve been using Medium to publish a serialized story called Extraction.
2. Medium Measures Reader Engagement
In Christopher Nolan’s film The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s Joker says to someone,
“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”
Most writers dream of making a living from their writing, but few writers have the opportunity to build an audience, which you need to build a successful career, without first writing for free. Especially in today’s world.
Free work is a gateway to building a career.
Some bloggers are fortunate enough to build a full-time income from blogging, but none of them start that way. Every blogger starts writing for free or next-to-free.
The great thing about Medium is the measurement tools you have at your disposal when you publish a post on Medium. Writing a story and having 1,000 views is great, but it’s not really a measurement of success on Medium.
To really know if you’re engaging readers, Medium’s measurements are built around the concept of Total Time Reading.
Medium measures how long a reader stays with your story.
Do they read it all the way to the end, or do they stop somewhere in the middle?
While Medium doesn’t tell you exactly where a reader stops reading a story you’ve written, you at least know that if you’ve had 1,000 Views but only 342 Reads, something needs to change.
Having this kind of tool at your disposal can make you a better writer if you utilize it to try something new with each story that fails to engage your audience.
3. Medium is Designed for Interaction
If you want to know how well your stories are doing, how they’re coming across to readers, whether something works or not, reader interaction can be invaluable.
Fortunately, Medium is built to encourage reader interaction.
They provide two key tools for readers to insert their thoughts about a story.
- Notes — Readers can highlight any text in your story and insert a note that will appear as a collapsible comment to the side of your text. These function as private messages to you, the author. They’re a great way for a reader to highlight and comment on something specific they either enjoyed or didn’t like about your story.
- Responses — These come at the bottom of your story and they work like comments on a blog, except each response becomes a story of its own on Medium. If somebody writes a response to your story, anyone who reads their response has a link to your story, which has the potential to widen your readership. You can even use this feature to provide your own footnotes that readers can read if you want to provide more information about something you’ve written but don’t want it to be part of the main text.
4. People Browsing Medium are Looking for Something to Read
Medium is all about sharing ideas, so anyone who is spending any amount of time browsing Medium is looking for something great to read.
This is great news because Medium is a ready-made platform where people go to look for great content. If you can write something compelling, people will find your work.
More Resources for Fiction Writers on Medium
Medium is easy to use, but there are some great resources that will show you how to make the most of the platform and reach more people with your writing.
- The Ultimate Guide to Medium by Greg Muender — This eBook is actually published on Medium, and it’s the best resource I’ve come across for utilizing Medium effectively. In fact, Greg’s book is the reason I started using Medium more in the last couple months.
- 35 Actionable Tips to Grow Your Medium Blog by Ali Mese
- The 8 Medium Features You Might Not Know About by Greg Muender
- A Reader’s Guide to Supporting Writers on Medium — I wrote this post to help readers better engage with their favorite writers on Medium.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider reading some of these others:
Tom Farr is a writer, teacher, and storyteller who believes in crafting lies to tell the truth. When he’s not enjoying the good life with his beautiful wife Lindsey and their three much-adored children, he’s striving to create stories that thrill and inspire and preparing for the day Disney calls him to write a Star Wars movie. He’s also a contributing editor for Made Up Words. His work has also appeared on Panel & Frame, Wordhaus, Curiosity Never Killed the Writer, and The Unsplash Book. Check out his fiction writing portfolio on Medium and sign up for his author newsletter.
