Member-only story
Settling For Self-Publishing
Is it a sound strategy now that I have 500+ followers?
I’d never have considered this strategy in my first year. If I aspired to earn an income from writing, I might not do it. As of last week (August 11–18, 2023), I had 580 followers, 412 views and 42 reads. I’d also commented on almost 1,300 articles since joining three years ago.
It was through doing research for articles that I discovered Medium. Since the quality of what I found here from Google searches was far better than anything else, I became a paid member in August 2020. I can’t imagine letting Medium lapse even if I stopped writing.
A week after joining, I discovered I could create a great-looking post on Medium, with minimum tech headaches. In my first two weeks, I only read and responded to plenty of articles. After that, knowing nothing about publications, I self-published about two articles per week.
In my second month, the editor of An Idea approached me to write for them. Amazing!! Someone actually READ something I wrote! So I approached other publication and found editors who accepted me as a writer. Except for short pieces where I skipped images, I rarely self-published in my first two years.
