My 3-Step Plan to Make Money by Writing Fiction on Medium
I see a lot of questions about Medium cross my socials. One of the most common is whether Medium is a good platform for writing fiction.
I’ve avoided the question, because I like to be an expert in what I’m talking about, and I’ve only ever made $1.49 by writing fiction on Medium. Hardly a knowledge whiz.
But I saw the question surface often enough that I wanted to put some serious thought into how I’d do this. This article will get into the pros and cons of using Medium as a platform for your fiction writing as well as the 3-step plan for how to actually do it.
If you prefer the video version, check it out here:
My YouTube video on how to make money by writing fiction on Medium
The Pros and Cons of Writing Fiction of Medium
The short answer is yes, Medium is a good place to write and earn money for your fiction — but with caveats.
First, why is Medium potentially a good platform to write fiction?
Medium is, in my opinion, the very best place to make money by writing on the internet. No ads, just good content. So if I have an existing audience — like my newsletter, my YouTube channel, or anywhere else, I can point eyeballs to my stories and earn money for any reads I get through Medium’s Partner Program, which is royalty-based.
Second, it’s so user friendly. Part of the reason I have a Medium blog and not a wordpress blog is because literally all I need to get started is an idea. I can start typing up a storm and publish within the hour. The layout is lovely, simple, reader-centric.
What are the downsides of writing fiction on Medium?
The primary downside is Medium’s distribution system. Unlike any other social media platform, the way people get shown content isn’t purely algorithmically based on a combination of popular + who you follow. In addition to those, which are also a factor, Medium also hand-picks (“curates”) stories for further distribution. It curates stories into topics people follow, like relationships, psychology, pets, and fiction. (Yep, we’ll get into that exciting word in just a second!)
Functionally, this means I can write something today with no followers, have it curated, and get 100s of views if it’s distributed in topics people follow.
However, Medium has pretty strict rules on what is and isn’t curated. It has to be good, it has to be accurate, and it has to be standalone. That is, if I publish a 3-part series on how to write a best-selling book, I can guarantee it won’t be curated because each of the three parts is not standalone.
This is not a problem for short fiction, like satire, humor, or flash fiction. It’s also not a problem for long-form fiction, like books published all in a single post (like this one). These frequently get curated in the fiction topic. But when people talk about writing fiction on Medium, they typically mean publishing chapter by chapter. And — you guessed it — those chapters don’t standalone.
Plus, right now the audience just not as well-defined for fiction. People come to Medium expecting, frankly, self-help. But three years ago, people came to Medium expecting programming. It still exists, of course, but the market for me to write about my pets, my favorite memes, my life stories, and so much more now exists. The same will be true for fiction: if you build it (your friction story), they (your fiction readers) will come.
How do you make the most of the benefits while minimizing the downsides?
The 3 Step Plan to Make Money by Writing Fiction on Medium
Before I launch in, a caveat: this is not a start-today, rich-tomorrow type of scheme. This is a years-long type of plan. This is for people, like me, who want to someday have a good audience for writing fiction on Medium but understand it can’t be accomplished in a short time span.
Medium does have tools to let authors build audiences — today, using Publications and Letters, but tomorrow potentially other tools, too. They have a vested interest in helping readers find writers they like, no matter the subject. Let’s make the most of that.
Step 1: Build your ideal fiction audience.
Your book is like any other product, and Medium is just like any other marketing platform. (Kind of. Bear with me.)
The very first thing you should do is figure out who you want to read your book. In my case, it’s people like me, who love fantasy novels. Then brainstorm a bunch of non-fiction story ideas. For me, I could think of a few:
How to Write Convincing Fantasy
The Best Fantasy Books of 2020
How XYZ Author Creates Fully Developed Worlds
Create a publication (mine would be called “The Best of Fantasy” or something like that). Then, publish as many articles as you can in that publication. The idea is you’ll be curated and start to garner followers to that publication.
Step 2: Grow your publication to a good size.
This is both the shortest and longest part: grow your publication to a decent number of followers. It takes time to build a following — I gained 13,000 in about two years. I’d say minimum 5,000 for mine, but you can pick any number for yours.
The best way to grow followers is to consistently publish high quality articles that are curated in specific topics. In this case, I’d probably aim for Writing and maybe Fiction. You can also try simply writing in other publications with lots of followers — those readers might follow your personal profile, and then when you publish a story in your writing pub, they may see it cross their feed and choose to follow from there.
Step 3: Create a second Medium publication where your fiction story will live.
You have your audience, you’ve reached critical mass — now you can start to point them in the right direction.
Use Medium’s publication newsletter feature to email all the followers of my your pub about the existence of the second, fiction publication. You’ve gathered an audience which is likely to be invested in your journey and interested in your story.
I’d email them every time I published a new chapter, too. So despite not being curated, I could ensure a steady stream of eyeballs on my chapters. The home would be simple to point people to; it’s easy to write in Medium. Publications lend themselves well to serial telling — you can link each chapter to the next and previous.
And the upshot would be you’d get paid for people reading your work, even if it’s fictional. Plus, you reserve the rights to remove it off the platform, sell it on Amazon, whatever, at any point you want. You own all the rights to your own work here, which means Medium does not have to be the final home for your story.
Medium is one of the best places to get paid for writing on the internet because the logic is simple: if people read it, you get money. The tricky part is factoring in how people will read it, especially if you don’t have an existing audience.
However, this plan will give you (and me too, someday) the chance to use Medium as a home for our fiction stories, and be paid for them while not relying on curation.
