Wow, Jack Preston King , your numbers are in the stratosphere! Some questions though: Medium gathers no dust? Really? From the moment you publish a story there is a visibility window of about 24 to 48 hours before the story drops into the bottomless Medium abyss. If you’re lucky enough and your stuff is mainstream enough for a Medium curator to grant it visibility that visibility window can stretch to last a week or even slightly longer before it drops from sight into the abyss. Promoting your own work at the bottom of a newly published piece helps only a teeny tiny bit. Publishing through Medium publications can increase views by maybe 10 to 20 percent but stories published in publications can drop from sight almost as quickly.
As far as curation goes I agree that quality is of primary importance but it seems to me that the curators also look for quantity. They tend to favor authors with humongous followings. They also seem to favor formulaic mainstream articles over stories that push the envelope of literary convention or social convention. To me their focus seems rather narrow. I’ve seen a lot of articles and stories of marginal quality not only being granted visibility by the curators but strongly pushed by them while I’ve seen truly quality articles and stories that are never granted visibility.
And with tens of thousands of articles and stories being published every day Medium couldn’t possibly have enough curators to read everything that is published. And they couldn’t possibly have enough curators to read every tip sent to tips@medium.com. I used to send an email tip for every single piece I published but I finally gave up because it seemed to make no difference whatsoever. (It started to seem like it actually had a negative effect.)
Yes, those literary rags provide tiny visibility but just because Medium has untold millions of readers doesn’t automatically mean your story will be visible to untold millions of readers. The challenge on Medium is getting your piece in front of an open-minded curator. Unless one writes formulaic mainstream self-help articles that can be a formidable task.
Of course the main thing is to not give up. Publishing on Medium is a lot like playing the lottery. You can’t win if you don’t play. And the odds of winning some visibility on Medium are definitely a little better than the odds of winning the lottery. One might not win the big visibility prizes but occasionally one might win a smaller visibility prize and that can make a big difference.
