What’s this curation thing all about?
This is where Medium has some advantage over having your own website, though, and where there’s some learning curve. Medium will share your posts with some of their extensive reader base if you meet their curation guidelines and a curator decides it’s worth sharing.
Curators are live people, not an algorithm. That means it’s a subjective system. Sometimes you write a post that fully meets the guidelines and it’s still not curated and you don’t get to know why. Is that frustrating? Oh yes. But it is what it is.
My experience is that curation is possible. You might hear otherwise from people who are not being curated at all or as often as they’d like to be. A few months ago I did a little experiment with opening a second account under an anonymous name to see if I’d be curated there as easily as I am on this account. I wanted to know if I’d just got in early and had some kind of privilege tied to that.
My posts on that anonymous account were curated at about the same rate as my posts here. So, if you learn how to write to Medium’s aesthetics, you shouldn’t have a problem getting them on board with promoting at least some of your work.
Remember that Medium is a platform, but it’s also a publisher. You can publish anything you want, but they won’t promote everything that’s published here.
What if I’m not curated?
If you’re not curated, it’s not the end of the world. Medium will make your post available on your profile. They’ll show your work to your followers via their front pages.
The problem comes if you’re a brand new writer on Medium and you’re not curated at some point in the first several posts. At some point, Medium seems to stop sending your posts to curators all together. They assume that you’re not writing at a professional level and because they have limited resources (human curators and their time) your posts aren’t considered anymore.
You don’t want that to happen.
In my experience, when that happens to someone who is a decent writer it’s almost always because someone didn’t read and understand the curation guidelines. They broke the rules because they didn’t know them. The most common violations are writing posts that are part of a series (Medium will never curate these) or not citing every single photo (even those that you don’t think need citation.)
Clickbait titles are also a reason posts will be passed for curation. The content of the post must deliver on the promise of the title. This is the one that I struggle with sometimes. Clickbait isn’t about being sensational. It’s about telling readers you’re going to write one thing and then actually giving them something else.
How do I get paid?
The $5 that readers pay to subscribe to Medium is paid to writers based on the time they spend reading each writer’s posts.
You create a Stripe account, which allows you to be paid directly into your bank account. It takes about five minutes to get signed up and is very secure. Unfortunately not every country has access to Stripe, so not everyone can write on Medium for pay.
Click the link below to get signed up to write behind the paywall, which you need to do to get paid.
