The Writer's Life: Life After Medium and Writing Short Books

It has been around six months since I left Medium (you can find out why in this six part series — The Truth About Medium).

I no longer post on Medium as much as I once did. Most of the time, I will import a post from this blog, to keep things going, and see if anyone reads it.

That was one of the difficulties at Medium: finding the audience and getting reads. It is a site that does all the SEO stuff for you. If it did, I’m not sure that it helped in any way. It sounds like a good idea, just post and trust the algorithm to find readers for you, but I can’t say it worked well for me.

I tend to do my own SEO and keywords on this blog, with a little help from ChatGPT. AI is useful in that regard. In fact, I would say that I get a better response doing this myself on my own blog than I did relying on Medium's algorithm.

I still like Medium, but not enough to renew my membership, and that leads to a downside.

Because membership on Medium is the way to be paid there, it is very difficult to get any traction on the site as a non-member. I suspect that many members will not spend time reading the stories of non-members, unless your name is well known, like Barack Obama or Avi Loeb.

As a non-member, you also don’t have access to most of the content on Medium, for obvious reasons. Most of it is behind a paywall. You can read the content of other non-members, though. Unfortunately, Medium does not make it easy for you to find them. 

In fact, the algorithm mostly directs me to member stories, which I can’t read. I suspect it does so because it wants me to sign up and pay again; after all, Medium is a business. If there is a way on Medium to find non-member content or anything free to read, I haven’t found it.

But I’m not tempted yet to rejoin the site. Having reduced payments to writers by up to 95%, I don’t get the impression that much has changed. 

I also found the site difficult to navigate to actually find content that I want to read. It’s not because of a lack of content; it’s just that you can end up doom-scrolling for hours looking for something. Medium has millions of articles and stories. Thousands of publishers. Most of it is member content, and behind the paywall.

For now, I have moved on, and I’m also busy now with this blog. When I was on Medium, I did somewhat neglect it, but things have picked up recently. Slowly, views and reads are picking up.

I’ve also been book writing. I have completed three books that will be available shortly. And ‘short’ is the right word. They are short reads, around 20,000 words. It’s a format that I now prefer, and I have read that shorter reads have become very popular.

I will write more about these books in due course.

 

 

Image by Alexa from Pixabay