Well, I Finally Did It

And I was shocked, to say the least

Image by qiesnusantara26 from Pixabay (cropped by author)

Show of hands. How many of you have seen the articles telling you that you should download your Medium file to your hard drive and take a look around and see what you see? I know you have because I’ve seen those articles more than once.

Despite cranking out however many posts I’ve cranked out today, and checked Twitter, and YouTube, and my email, and… I’ve been bored sh*tless. So I decided just to have something to do I’d download my Medium file and see if I saw anything interesting.

I poked through the zip file. Ho-hum. I wasn’t seeing anything spectacular to make it worth my while. Then I saw Partner Program. I had no clue what could possibly be in there but I clicked it anyway.

Screenshot by author

In order of which post made me the most money to date and down from there, is every post I’ve made on Medium in the nearly year and a half I’ve been on here. As you can see I have three posts that have made me over $30 each; four over $20; and three over $10 each.

In my best Carrie Bradshaw voice, I can’t help but wonder,

would my posts fair better if I just stopped writing?

Maybe from Deuces B!tches down I should simply pull from the platform. That would leave 28 pieces for readers to read. Over and over and over again. I mean seriously. If you read one of them per day you could miss two days and have a month’s worth of reading material. Then on the first, you could start all over again.

I’m kidding. Okay. I’m half kidding. I think if I wrote less I’d actually make more money. I am my own competition. I’ve published four times in the last 24 hours. I have one post each sitting at two different publications waiting for them to pull the trigger. Now I have this piece.

Nobody wants to read that much crap from me!

Plus I have one that I’ve scheduled to publish Monday and another one Tuesday both at 9 am EST. Nine pieces in 72 hours. Sheesh.

Maybe it’s time for a vacation?

I’ve tried taking days off however and my reads and interactions tank. Maybe I should use the scheduling feature more. I used it all last week for the AI review pieces. But I still published more personal essays on top of that.

This platform is full of advice of all kinds so what say you readers and writers of Medium?

Should I only publish once a day?