Wow, I’m jealous of your astronomically high numbers. I can totally relate to what you are saying about quality posts. I can spend 4 or 5 days working on a short story, making it as perfect as I can, and I’ll be lucky to get 5 reads. I can spend a half hour on a throwaway story and I’ll get 10 times as many reads. It is very disheartening but I don’t let it stop me from putting stories out there.

The read ratio stats can be particularly depressing. I agree that these numbers are skewed downward by speed readers (those who merely skim your story or article). That is sad because so much subtle nuance is missed by reading as fast as possible. For me personally, if a story is well-written I read as slowly as I can so that I can savor every word and turn of phrase and so that I can catch the stories within the stories and other subtleties.

As for partner program locked stories, I’ve learned that if a Medium curating editor does not pick your story to be featured it will never be seen by anyone except your followers in your network feed. I’ve also learned that it is best to save your best stories to be published during office hours in San Francisco, Monday through Friday. Publishing them on the weekend almost guarantees lower numbers and that your story won’t be seen by the almighty curators.

And the saddest thing is length of story. It it’s over a 5 minute read it simply won’t be clicked on by many folks. The important thing is to NOT cut your story way down because of this. By doing this you are only encouraging the ever-decreasing attention span of readers.

The most important thing for all Medium writers is to not write for numbers. I know this is how partner program writers get paid but if we constantly check our stats and try to write only for numbers our writing is sure to suffer. Don’t ever let the numbers get you down.