Publication Talk
It’s getting to the point where there are almost more publications than individual authors on Medium. It’s kind of turning me off. I am publishing independently more and more. Sometimes when I’m published in a publication my numbers are lower than if I had published independently. When they are higher they are just barely higher. I get better numbers when a piece is curated than I ever get being in some big publication that brags about how many members they have.
Back in 2015 when I started with Medium I started my own publication as a means to gather and showcase my work. Then the Partner Program came along but locked stories were not allowed in publications. So I quit publishing in my own publication and began to laboriously move all my stories out of the publication so that I could get paid for them. I was about 90% finished with that herculean task when Medium suddenly changed its mind and began allowing locked stories in publications. I felt like a ping-pong ball being batted back and forth by Medium. I’m not sure Medium will ever make up their mind how they feel about publications.
I figured the best solution was to create an archive index page that showed all 1900+ articles and stories that I’ve published in one easily scrolled page. I blew off the idea of having my own publication. The publication archive system is a joke. All you can find is the top ten posts for any given month. If your story is the eleventh most popular post that month it simply cannot be found. I wanted to have EVERYTHING easily found with nothing hidden behind the scenes. My archive page works well for that.
I’ve noticed that publications are getting stricter and stricter lately as far as what they will accept, mostly in regard to length. So many publication editors will not accept anything over a 5 minute read (or less). When I first started on Medium there were a lot of 15, 20, 25 or more minute reads but now they are very rare. The publication editors are pandering to short attention spans. It’s like they have gotten together to make Medium more like Twitter. I recently had a story rejected by three different publications because it was too long. So I published it independently and it almost instantly got curated and it did rather well. It really didn’t need to be in some high-brow, snobby publication.
Of course there are a handful of publications that I truly love. I still submit maybe one in six of my stories to publications but that is a significant decrease and it may be decreasing even more soon. I’m getting over publications.
And speaking of waiting times… I submitted a poem to a poetry publication 52 days ago and they still have not published it (or rejected it). I’d withdraw it except I am curious to see just how long it takes. The average wait time seems to be between 4 and 10 days. The trick is to not submit to the really large publications. After a lengthy wait time you may finally get published by them but your story is on their home page for only 24 hours or less before it disappears forever into the publication archive because they publish so many stories every day. That’s not worth the extra 10 or 20 views on that first day. I suggest submitting to small to medium sized pubs so your story will retain visibility for more than just 24 hours.
But I also suggest publishing independently. With the incredible glut of publications on Medium I predict that publishing independently will soon see a resurgence in popularity. I plan on being ahead of that curve.
I’ve been boycotting Facebook for quite some time so I don’t know anything about the groups you were talking about, Stephen. From what you’ve shared it doesn’t sound like I’m missing much.
