Quite frankly, I’m rather fed up with publications, too. Small, medium, and especially big. The bigger the publication the more hyper focused on numbers they seem to be. It’s all quantity over quality. Yuck. It’s all business and all marketing.

For me writing is not a business. I’m not a content mill. I don’t care to spend 5 or 6 hours a day marketing the hell out of my art. I don’t want to turn my art into some entrepreneurial gotta-get-to-the-top enterprise like so many writers on Medium. For me, when writing becomes a competition it loses everything I like about it. When it becomes a get-rich scheme I just want to quit writing and reading.

Another reason I prefer publishing independently (or in tiny pubs) is because I can write the way I want to. I don’t care for some gosh darn publication editor telling me that I need to dumb down my writing in order to reach the widest audience possible (lowest common denominator marketing). I don’t care for some gosh darn publication editor telling me that I need to change my style and write more mainstream formulaic self-help articles that appeal to people in their Twenties. I won’t change my art to match what some gosh darn publication editor thinks is more acceptable according to their own personal tastes and to what they think is more marketable. I won’t change the way I have been doing my art for the last 50 years because it may not match what some freaking young publication editor learned in the creative writing class they took in college three or four years ago.

Is it any wonder most all of the big name Medium publications refuse to publish me? That’s fine by me. I refuse to become a content mill churning out mainstream formulaic articles for their benefit.

Thank goodness I am no longer a writer! But if I was still a writer for whom numbers are more important than words and money is more important than art and the whole process of writing is just a business, then I would definitely suggest courting the big name publications. After all, I’ve noticed the stories and articles on Medium never seem to get curated nowadays unless they are in big name publications — preferably in the Medium run publications. If numbers and money and marketing and exposure and one’s materialistic goals are more important than the joy and art of writing then publications are definitely the way to go.

To me, the publications on Medium are a lot like all those cliques back in high school or like the fraternities and sororities in college. It’s a social imperative we never seem to question. Like almost everything in society, on Medium the golden brick road to our exalted writing dreams is paved by the groups of people we join. How can we ever be successful unless we are part of the ‘correct’ and most popular fraternity or sorority?

Even though I am not a writer I may be called that by some because I write so damn much. But if I am called a writer I would want only one adjective attached to that, and that is… INDEPENDENT.

But that is just me. If a writer is preoccupied with ‘success’ it is highly recommended that they never, ever, ever follow my advice.