Hey there, Brett. Thanks for stopping by.

It depends on the publication I would guess. I know some of the BIG ones get a lot of submissions but because they only put out quality, it may take them a while of fishing to find something acceptable.

I used to be an editor for one large pub and three smaller ones on here so I know both sides of it. Some of it has to do with workflow. For example, if you have let’s say four publications and at least two of them are genre-specific you would think that you would require writers to submit to those pubs only and not one of your generic ones, right? But because the LARGE one has (supposedly as in lots of bots) a lot of followers, writers who don’t think things through only want to submit to the large pub in order to get more reads.

The only problem with that idea is that if the large publication shoves out 100+ articles per day, yours get lost in that. No one sees it anyway. Each article that comes out after yours pushes yours further and further towards the bottom.

Then it becomes a publisher issue. If the publisher says all genres can submit then as an editor you really don’t have much of a choice. I would tell people though what I’ve just told you and then tell them that I have access to all of the pubs so if they want to pull from the large and submit to one of the other three I can pop over and publish them there immediately. I wasn’t forcing anyone to do anything. I let the writer decide. More often than not they would opt for the quick turnaround.

Then there are the limitations that Medium sets into place. Each pub is only allowed X number of editors. If you submit to a pub that gets 100s of subs a day and there are only 30 editors… Well, you can see where that could be a problem. And editors volunteer so there is no pay involved. And they have jobs, and spouses, and kids, and parents and people get sick, and cars break down, and well life.

The system at its current state is without question a broken system. But for the time being it’s the only system we’ve got. My advice to you is this. Find 6–12 pubs (depending upon how much and how often you write) with about 2–3k followers and spread your workaround. More than likely each pub has a different set of followers. Not always but some. That way you truly are getting 12–24k or more sets of eyes on your work.

Make sense?