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

It has been around six months since I ended my membership on Medium (you can find out why in this 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 just 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 says it 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 — to just post and trust the algorithm to find readers for you — but I can’t say it worked that well. Not for me anyway.

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 on my own blog than I did on Medium.

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 there will not spend time reading the stories of non-members unless your name is well known, like Barack Obama’s or Avi Loeb’s.

As a non-member, you also don’t have access to most of the content on Medium, and for obvious reasons. Most of the site 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 you to member stories, which you can only read if you are a member (or if the member has put a “friends” link on the story — most don’t).

The algorithm wants me to sign up and pay; after all, Medium is a business.

If there is a way on Medium to find non-member content or anything free to read there, other than by luck, 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. And it’s not because of a lack of content there; 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.

I’m also busy now with this blog and writing books.

When I was writing on Medium, I did somewhat neglect both. I think I spent too much time there. Like social media, it can become addictive.

And I like the challenge of writing books and short stories.

I have recently completed three books that will be available shortly. And ‘short’ is the right word. They are short reads, around 20,000 words each. It’s a format that I now prefer.

Apparently shorter reads have become very popular.

 

Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash