Thanks to Everyone Reading This
My experience with the first month of regular writing on Medium
By MARTIN REZNY
Month ago, I have started doing something that I thought would make about as much sense as yelling into an empty room — publishing something pretty much every day on Medium. While none of my articles this month went viral, I must say that well over 2000 reads and almost 15% of that in recommends is not what I expected. I’d like to thank all of you, and explain my surprise.
The reason may not be what you think. I do believe that it is possible for an article, even my own article, to get a lot of reads here. My very first piece that I published on Medium only as a reply with no plan to write anything else afterwards has by now about 6000 reads, and who knows, if I tried to emulate exactly that again, I could probably figure out a formula to get that reliably.
But it’s important to note that I’m a bit of an idiot. I don’t want to write what would get the most reads, I just really, truly, passionately don’t want to write what I know would get more reads. If I wanted to do that, or at least could bring myself to do it, I’d be writing listicles and inspirational bullshit all the time. Instead, I simply chose to write whatever the hell I felt like writing.
I didn’t stick to one kind of article or even a single topic, which I know would have been a better strategy for the building of an audience. I didn’t hold back on the sophistication of language that I prefer to use. I didn’t write about trends I don’t follow. I kept bringing up weird and obscure Czech examples. I published my own sci-fi nonsense. I even published poetry for Christ’s sake.
And yet, almost everything got read at least somewhat, and almost everything got recommended by someone, with some articles having even about 50% of readers recommending them, while some others keep over 90% of reads to views ratio. What really surprised me was that the authors of The Expanse have tweeted about my article about the show, making it the most read one.
I suppose this means that everything is possible, including expressing oneself. So once again, thanks to everyone who has read anything I wrote, you have restored at least a small portion of my faith in humanity. As for the bad news, I’d still really hate to get all strategic about what or how I write, and that’s why I’m not really sure how long I will be able to continue doing any of this.
From the point of view of an aspiring science fiction writer, I must say that Medium unfortunately isn’t leaning in that direction very much. As someone has pointed out over here, Medium is becoming more and more like LinkedIn Pulse by the minute. There’s only so many times I can write about how this whole career chasing happy workaholism thing is silly, and it won’t be read much.
While my little experiment has proven at least to me that Medium has the most sophisticated audience of all of the social media sites, people able to appreciate quality writing, it’s still very conservative in terms of preferred subject matter and “entrepreneurial” to a point when even writers here seem to be more interested in articles about good writing rather than good writing.
Strangely enough, and this may actually be connected to the higher level of sophistication of the audience on Medium, people here seem to be way less confrontational than what I’m used to from my previous attempts at public writing, and that’s actually also not a good thing, because even though I’d like to debate and to engage more, I can’t do that against broad agreeableness.
I suppose I will keep on writing about stuff when I have something to say and sharing it with anyone who’ll care, and as long as I remain unemployed, I will have the time to do so regularly. I certainly have nothing to lose from a point of complete and utter career failure and absolute obscurity. But yeah, all of you entrepreneurs of Medium, I’m well aware of my doing everything wrong.
As someone who simply is wrong, I’m doing this mainly because it’s better than doing nothing. I don’t want to maximize my profits because it would force me to also do what everyone else is doing or at most a slightly different flavor of it, and so I’m bound to lose against the system and human nature. But I’m getting tired of hearing this argument about not even trying. I’ll try.
If you believe that whatever I do has any value and you’d like me to continue doing it to the best of my ability, you can support me by throwing some change into my tip jar. Even a single dollar is a meaningful amount of money. If you have somehow missed it, I also compose weird classical or soundtrack music, which you can listen to on my Bandcamp or SoundCloud.
But enough shameless begging. As promised, thank you for reading this!
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