A Story Behind the Story with Childlit Blogging. Also, How Are Things Going at Medium?

Robyn Budlender on Unsplash

Last week I revised Still Another Childlit Blog Gone into pretty much another essay, A Passion for Children's Books, which was accepted by and published at Books Are Our Superpower on Medium. 

I may be wrong, but I believe I've mentioned here before that using the same material in different ways for publication in different places is a classic freelance writer method of generating work. Also, Medium is open to its writers republishing their own work, so I could republish my Original Content work there, anyway. I think there are people who republish their Substack work at Medium and vice versa.

I do this kind of thing primarily with my Heritage Month posts. It gives me an opportunity to expose the books and writers I'm writing about, and yes, me, further than I could do just with the blog. It gives me an opportunity to promote all of us again on BlueSky and perhaps Facebook and my Goodreads blog. 

I also end up doing more thinking about my subject. When I first started doing this, I just did a little tinkering before submitting to Medium publications. My rewrites have become more and more involved, especially if I was combining and compressing more than one Original Content post. I'm embarrassed to say that it's almost as if the Original Content material is the first draft. 

And How Is Doing This Working Out for You, Gail?

Except for a few humor pieces, most of my submissions to Medium publications this year have been revisions of this type. I'm avoiding going to the work of creating brand new pieces for submission there, because readership is so low. The only time I do well there is if an accepted essay is nominated by the publication's editor and selected by the mysterious upper beings for what is called the Boost Program. This happened a couple of times this year, most recently with When the French Canadians Came to Town. In that situation, Medium gives articles more promotion, and there is the potential for many more readers, which can mean making more than a dollar and change for your writing. But you can't expect this to happen. I've had 14 articles or humor pieces published at Medium publications this year with 3 boosted. Of the other 11, six had so few readers that I made less than a dollar each on them. I did better than that a few years back. Now breaking a dollar is good news.

Therefore, this year I'm trying to spend more time submitting to literary journals, which so far has resulted in a piece of flash fiction, What We Do, being published in Stonecoast Review. Literary journals often don't have broad readership, either, and they often don't pay, so that doesn't seem a big gain over Medium. However, publication in literary journals may be better than Medium in terms of status, since they have more rigorous gatekeepers monitoring acceptance and are likely to have more professional editing. That means they could be better for building/maintaining a career. 

So while I'm not through with Medium by any means, my five-year Medium experience suggests it's not a place where I should be submitting all my work.