Getting Accepted is the “Easy” Part
But do you want to be there is the real question
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Recently a writer made a list of all of the places that they had been accepted as a writer on Medium. Twenty-one in all. On the surface that sounds impressive. Until you look at the list.
At least 7 on the list practically accept everyone. You’d have to be an all-out asshat not to get accepted. So that cuts that list down by a third.
About Me Stories? As far as I know, you write a story about you and you’re done. They collect bios. That’s it. It isn’t an ongoing writing gig.
11 of them I’ve never heard of. That doesn’t mean anything. There are thousands of publications on Medium.
3 had between 1500 and 3k followers. Decent as long as they are active readers.
3 had between 500 and 1000 followers.
5 had between 150 and 500 followers.
3 had less than 20 followers.
The only impressive one on the list was the Writing Cooperative. If you can get in there you’re doing really well as they don’t accept just anyone. But as for the rest?
Meh.
Small pubs will typically sign on anyone who asks because they need to grow. One pub that was mentioned… well, they lost more than half of their followers earlier this year when Medium cleaned house and deleted all of the dead and fake accounts. And the thinking over there is that if you as a writer ask to be added to one pub, you get added to all of their pubs whether you ever write for those pubs or not. Sounds like number inflation for marketing purposes to me.
So does that follower count really matter when you don’t know how genuine and authentic it really is? I’ve written about follower counts before. They are a guideline but not an end all be all to whether to decide to write for that publication or not.
I like that newbies get excited to be online and making a buck but like with all things in life,
