My Two Years on Medium
If you are one of my 170 followers, or you are a new reader, thank you for reading me! I have been on Medium for a little more than two years, and here is a little bit about it.
I make my living by writing—writing Javascript, that is! I am a Web application developer by trade. I make a trivial amount of money on a couple of books I wrote, but only a buck or two per book, and not many sales. I’m surprised there are any sales at all, since you can download the books for free from my website.
I post stories on Medium only occasionally, when I feel I have something original to say. Of the 14 stories I posted in my two years on Medium, only two stories have gotten more than 100 reads. For some reason, those two stories got about 1,000 reads each! Maybe they were featured, though I didn’t notice it. One story was picked up by a publication, but even it has only 87 reads.
My very first post and my third post seem, in retrospect, to have been impressively prescient, if I do say so myself. The first on on a trivial matter, the second one pretty obvious (now), but it needed to be plainly said. My dumbest post was a very short piece of fiction. I’d written one fiction piece before, two if you count this. Fiction is clearly not my ouevre.
I’ve also posted hundreds of responses to other peoples’ stories, probably about evenly split between something useful, something encouraging, or just trying to be funny. Another thing I love about Medium is that the responses are very nearly never spam or trolling. Often they are as interesting as the story itself!
Somehow, I’ve gathered 170 followers, though I’ve done nothing to encourage it. (Like publishing on a regular schedule, or having a consistent theme.) Sorry for not following you back, but really, I just don’t do social media. My Facebook account is only to read Bloom County, and I stopped tweeting ages ago.
The weirdest thing about my experience posting on Medium is that my 14 stories accumulated a grand total of only nine responses! A story that was specifically intended to be extra provacative got only one response. Even the two stories that got 1,000+ views, neither of them got any comments. Do I cover my subject matter so throughly that there is nothing left to be said? Do I make my arguments so convincingly that counter-arguments are futile? Do I present an unwelcoming attitude? It just seems strange. Like every author ( I think), I like getting feedback and I always reply. Ah well, I guess that’s just the Internet. Or maybe that’s what I get for not following people back!
I love being part of the Medium community, more for the reading side than writing. But it is great to have somewhere to post when I’ve got something on my mind—to be able to send my ideas out into the universe. (The metaverse?) Back in the early days of the Web, I posted to a personal website, but it is nicer being part of a reading/writing community. Thanks to everyone for all your great work, interesting stories and comments, and general sense of community and support, guys and gals of Medium!
