I thoroughly cringe when I see the term, ‘vanity publication.’ Please don’t use that term as a tab. My publication does not belong under such a hideous term.

When I first heard about Medium, that it was a great place for writers, I came to check it out. As a professional writer I was looking for additional exposure and hoped to create an author’s page at Medium. But I quickly realized that Medium offered ugly profile pages that could not be customized and publications that could be customized. But they did not offer author pages that could be customized. That was odd. If Medium was a great place for writers why did they not offer author pages that could be customized?

I was about to high-tail it out the door but after browsing Medium for a while I saw that other professional writers were getting around this vexing problem by utilizing the publication feature to create and customize an author page for themselves. So that is what I did.

As a professional author I needed to be able to customize a page to highlight my work and to showcase my novels and other books. With a publication I could do this. On my profile page, though, I could not customize anything and my work just ends up being buried under an endless stream of casual responses I’ve made to other people’s posts. The profile page simply cannot be utilized as an author page. So I did what many other authors did. I started a publication to showcase my work and my novels in a way that I could control and customize and organize my work in a way that was free of silly casual replies left in conversation with other Medium users.

My publication is a serious and professional author page but it is also a very serious publication. It is still a publication even if I don’t accept submissions.

I am a serious and professional writer and have been for several decades. Writing is my livelihood! If that makes me vain then I guess I’m just vain. You can call me vain but please don’t call my writing, my life’s work, a process of vanity. That is very degrading to us serious professional writers no matter how much truth there might be to it.