What Is a Medium Publication?
Short answer: a Medium publication is a themed collection of stories from one or more authors. The theme can be anything - cats, AI, or whatever the publication owner wants the theme to be.
Most publications are open to submissions from multiple writers, but some serve as a home for a single author’s stories.
It’s important to know that Medium publications are not owned by Medium. They’re owned by individuals who run them on Medium. Any Medium member can create a publication.
Overall, I love publications and I think they’re a great writer’s tool. Let’s get more into the details about:
How to submit to Medium publications
Benefits and disadvantages of submitting to a pub
What the best Medium publications for beginners are
How you can get a story accepted to a Medium publication
How Medium publication owners make money
How to create a Medium publication
What’s the difference between a user profile and a Medium publication?
Where to find a full list of Medium publications
If you still own the content you submit to a publication on Medium
How do I submit a story to a Medium publication?
There are two steps to submitting a story to a publication. First, you need to be accepted as a writer for a publication. Once you’re accepted, you can then submit stories within Medium.
Getting accepted as a writer differs from publication to publication. Typically, there are two routes publication owners will ask you to take:
Some require an article draft in advance. You will either email the editor with a draft, or you’ll submit your draft through a form. Here’s an example of what that looks like.
Some only require that you let them know you’re interested in writing for them. They’ll ask that you send them your profile either in email format or by leaving a comment. Here’s an example of what that looks like.
Publications that are open to accepting new writers typically make it clear how to apply to be a writer. If the guidelines aren’t clear, it probably means they’re not accepting new writers at the moment.
Once you’ve been accepted as a writer, you can then submit stories to them. Here’s how to submit a story to a publication once you’re accepted as a writer:
Open your ready-to-submit draft.
Click the little dots on the top right corner of your screen.
Select “Add to publication.”
Find the publication you want to submit to, and hit “Select and continue.”
Ensure you’re adhering to their guidelines for formatting, style, and topic.
Hit “submit.”
Add any tags, edit your title and subtitle if you like, and make sure the right image is cropping up.
Press submit to publication again and you’re off!
Pros and cons of submitting stories to Medium publications
Trying to decide whether you should submit a story to a publication or not? Let’s look at the pros and cons.
Benefits of submitting to a Medium publication
I love publications for two reasons: they’re a great springboard for beginners, and they allow writers like me to avoid niching.
Why pubs are so good for beginners? Imagine you start blogging on Medium today — naturally, you have zero followers. When you publish, you have to hope the algorithm catches it. What if it doesn’t?
That’s where publications come in. You can publish your story to a small base of dedicated readers who will discover and love your voice. They’ll follow you to ensure they get more of it. Lo and behold, with 0 followers, you can still get reads and claps and comments just by publishing in a publication.
How do pubs let me avoid niching? I have 88k followers as I write this. I don’t know what all 88k are interested in. But if I write about psychology or self-help, I submit those stories to Mind Cafe, a publication about curating peace and happiness in your life. If I write something about writing, I’d submit it to Writing Cooperative, all about writing. And if I have an article that’s about cats, I’d send it to Catness, the cat-themed publication.
That means that there’s a higher chance of interested readers finding and enjoying my story.
Reasons not to publish with a Medium publication
In exchange for that platform, you give up control. When you submit to a publication:
They decide whether to publish it or not
They decide when to publish it
They can change your title/content without warning (this happened to me, I was a little miffed)
They can remove your calls-to-action, or ask you to modify them
This is because they’re not just acting as a home to your story — they’re trying to grow a publication. That means they need consistent formatting and styling. But it means you give up control.
When you publish with a publication, you do NOT give up:
money
ownership
You get 100% of the money you earn from your story. No money goes to the publication, more on that below.
You also retain the full rights to your story on Medium. On Medium, you own your content, nobody else.
How do Medium publication owners make money?
Medium publication owners do not make money from running a publication directly. Medium does not pay them; they do not take any portion of the earnings of the stories in Medium.
If they make money, it is usually either by:
Growing their publication so big, that they can promote their own Medium articles and earn money that way.
For example, when I read a paywalled article from Better Programming on how to submit to Better Programming, the author of that story earns some money from me because I’m a paying Medium member.
They might also send out their own stories in their newsletters, which they grow by posting great stories from everyone.
Soliciting donations/sales on their publication page. For example, The Writing Cooperative has a Substack linked as well as the editor's book. They might hope that by driving traffic to their pub, they make money through sales and memberships.
Many publication owners never see a penny from their work. They cultivate publications as a labor of love, spending many unpaid hours to make Medium a better, more organized and curated place to hang out and read.
I have a lot of respect for Medium publication editors — it’s hard work! And for most, it’s unpaid.
How do I create a Medium publication?
Maybe, despite my little rant above, you’re interested in creating a Medium publication. There are a lot of benefits to creating your own Medium publication.
You can create a home for an underserved topic. For example, Thomas Smith saw a gap on Medium for stories about AI — it caught a lot of us by surprise! So here spun up The Generator, and it’s now one of the leading pubs on the topic.
You can grow a separate platform for your stories that don’t fit or get accepted anywhere else. For example, I have my own publication Zulie Writes. Occasionally, I’ll get a story turned down from a pub, but I still have a nice landing pad for those stories.
If you want to take advantage of those benefits, you can easily whip up a publication in less than ten minutes. I outline the process here:
One important caveat: today, you need to be a paying Medium member to create a publication. You cannot be a free member; you need to pay your $5 monthly membership fee to create a publication.
This makes sense to me — Medium wants to ensure that only people who are contributing to Medium and its reader/writer community are able to take advantage of its best features.
If you’re interested in signing up to be a paying Medium member, you can do so via this link.
What’s the difference between a user profile and a Medium publication?
When you publish a story on Medium, it automatically goes to live on your user profile. When you publish a story to a Medium publication, it also lives on the publication’s page.
Your profile is your home base, with only your stories on it. You write your own Bio and your own About page. It’s all you.
A Medium publication is an optional themed layer on top of your profile. It can also hold stories from people who aren’t you. That’s the only difference.
Why would a writer ever publish a story in their own publication, and not just self-publish it?
Think of it as an additional boost. When I self-publish a story, it gets sent out to a small portion of my followers. If they respond well, Medium pushes it out to more followers and readers who might be interested in the topic, even if they don’t follow me.
When I publish a story in my own publication, Zulie Writes, it goes directly to a landing pad of around 1,000 of my biggest fans. Plus, when I publish in my own publication, other people might choose to follow it. The more followers it has, the more useful it is t me as a landing pad.
Furthermore, publications have a newsletter functionality that regular profiles don’t get. As the editor of Zulie Writes, I can write and send an email that goes directly to the inboxes of those followers. I can’t do that with my 88k profile followers.
Where can I find a full list of Medium publications?
No such list exists, sadly! This is because Medium publications are almost constantly being created, deleted, or abandoned. It’d be impossible to keep up with, wouldn’t it?
The best way to find a list of current publications is via tag pages.
Go to the Explore Topics page.
Pick one you find interesting, like Horoscopes. This takes you to a list of all the stories that have been published with the tag (similar to Instagram or Twitter hashtags) “Horoscope.”
Select “latest” on the top bar, or type it into the URL: https://medium.com/tag/horoscopes/latest.
Scroll down, making note of any publications you see. This tells you which are still active in that tag. For example, in Horoscopes, I see Astro Pagan and Metanoia –Holistic Personal development.
From there, you can start developing your own list of active publications you might like to submit to.
That’s the best way to figure out the best publication to submit to!
What are the best Medium publications for beginners?
Take that process I just showed you above. Now with your shortlist of publications, you’re going to look for two things.
Are they open and welcome to beginners?
Is there good engagement?
Here’s how you figure that out.
Is the pub open to beginners?
There are two things you’re looking for.
Do they may it easy to apply?
Is there high user engagement?
Is it easy to apply?
When you go to the publication homepage, you should see a very obvious guide on how to submit to them. Something like:
“Write for us.”
That’s how you know it’s possible as a beginner to get started.
If you are ever:
confused by the guidelines
not able to find the submission guidelines
asked to pay money to submit
It’s not a good publication for beginners. It’s pretty simple to add new writers, so if the editor isn’t able or willing to give clear instructions, they may be new to the field of editing or publication management, so they’re not a great fit for you.
Is there good reader engagement?
For established writers, this isn’t as important. But as a beginner, this is crucial. You want a publication to act as a landing pad for your stories.
Here’s how you know if there’s good user engagement. Basically, you want a publication with a lot of claps and comments per article.
Go to a publication’s latest page. This shows all the stories they’ve published in reverse chronological order. The secret URL is just [publication URL]/latest, so e.g. https://writingcooperative.com/latest.
Look at the latest ten stories they published. How many claps? How many comments did each story get?
For example, on Writing Coop, the latest ten stories got between 50 and 800 claps. They received between 0 to 14 responses apiece. I consider this good engagement.
Compare pubs until you find one that’s a good fit and highly engaged.
This isn’t always the biggest — in my opinion, it’s much more important to pick engagement over size. If a pub has 100k followers, but averages 50-100 claps per story, that’s worse than a pub with 1k followers and an average 50-100 claps per story. That publication’s audience is way more engaged.
Final thoughts on what publications are in Medium
To sum up, a Medium publication is a collection of themed stories, written by one or more writers. Pubs run by unpaid editors. Some publications are generalist; others are very specific. Some allow all writers; others are more exclusive; others still are just for a single writer.
They’re the best place for beginners to publish stories on Medium thanks to their boosting effect on your stories, even with zero followers.
There are pubs about cats, writing, AI, and just about everything else you can imagine. And if you can’t find one that suits your needs? Make your own!
