Not Everyone Will like Your Writing
By: Tesia Blake
Tags: Writing, Medium, Productivity, Creativity

Not Everyone Will like Your Writing

And some of your Medium stories will flop. And some people will make more money than you. And life is unfair. Learn to live with it.

I’ve been writing on Medium for 8 months, and I feel like it’s a privilege to have gained an audience, and an honor to be able to say I have regular readers. I’m grateful for every view, for every clap, but whenever I see the same readers popping up on my notifications over and over again, I’m especially touched.

That said, I know not everyone likes my stories, and I know not every one of my stories is a hit. Sometimes, readers jump to the response section to tell me how much they think I suck, and sometimes, my stories will “die” at 25 claps.

Yes, I have over three thousand followers, I regularly contribute to one of Medium’s largest publications, I get curated fairly often (a little over half of my stories published in May were curated), but some of my stories still struggle to reach 10 fans.

Let’s break down these two “issues,” shall we?

The impossibility of being universally liked is a lesson from kindergarten. From the moment that first kid pushes you on the playground, or that clique won’t let you be a part of their little gang, or that girl won’t let you sit next to her during recess, you learn: not everyone will like you. And if your teacher is a good teacher, and your parents are good parents, they will teach you that not everyone has to like you, and you have to learn to live with it.

(These days, I think they just put the kids together and force them to get along, but in my time, we were still allowed to have personal preferences as to whom we considered our friends, and were taught to stand up to bullies ourselves, but I digress.)

The fact is that not even Harry Potter is universally liked (let’s give Jesus a break), so how can I expect to be?

That’s why it doesn’t bother me when I receive comments from people who dislike my writing. If nothing else, it helps me with that whole thick skin situation everyone keeps saying writers should have.

Moving on.

When I joined the Medium Partner Program, my rationale was: “let’s see if I can make $50 bucks in a month. And if it doesn’t pay off in a month or two, I’ll move on to the next thing.”

I started posting almost every day (20 stories in the first month), and I was very fortunate to have one of them go viral, with 60K views and over one thousand fans up until today. Let’s just say I got considerably more than “just $50 bucks” that first month, and I haven’t yet found a reason to quit Medium.

I may not have found a reason to quit the platform, but I have had plenty of reasons to worry about Medium’s future as a whole, and my future as a small part of its ecosystem.

I’ve gone two weeks without having a single story curated, despite posting something new every day. I’ve watched my daily views drop from 2.5K to 1.5K and wondered how they could continue to go down despite the fact that I kept posting daily, and if that meant it was the end for me.

After having a story go viral and reach over one thousand fans (see above), I had to see many stories flop, including one that flopped so hard it got exactly ONE fan:

To this day, I have 56 stories with less than 10 fans, and 47 stories with over 100 fans. When I look at stories with over 200 fans, that number drops to 26.

I’ve been posting on Medium for 8 months, I wrote over 200 stories in that time, and only 26 of them have 200 fans or more.

All other stories are somewhere in between, but more than half of my stories have less than 50 fans.

More than half.

That to me means only one thing: I can’t count on success. All I can do is try my best, knowing full well I’ll have to see a lot of stories flop so that a few can succeed.

It’s like they say in economics, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

Until April, my curation rate had been at around 30%. In April, I saw that number drop to 26% — that was when I had my 2 week curation “drought.”

I could have raged against the algorithm, against the curators, against other writers who were posting viral content that was overshadowing mine. I could have complained I was being censored. I could be jealous of how much other writers were making and suggested Medium capped earnings at some arbitrary number I pulled out of a hat.

I didn’t do any of that.

It turns out I understand the kindergarten lesson that not everyone has to like me and what I do.

It turns out seeing other writers make more money than I make inspires me to try to get there someday. I don’t believe they need to fail, or be capped, so that I can succeed.

It turns out I understand the “past performance is no guarantee of future results” principle, and that every day on Medium is a new day. A new day to write and share stories about things that matter to me, to earn what’s mine, day after day, not to feel entitled to some result or another just because.

Instead of raging against the platform, I went back to the drawing board. I asked myself, “what am I doing wrong? How can I do better?”

My strategy had always been to write honestly about what I care about, and that hadn’t changed. I realized, however, that I had been trying to post too often, which sometimes caused my writing to feel more forced than natural. I actually had better results when I posted less, which meant I should write only when I felt I was most inspired.

In May, the adjustments I made to my writing process paid off, and my curation rate shot up to 51%. As for earnings, I earned in May only U$100 less than in April. Considering May was a 4 week pay period and April had been a 5 week pay period, I saw that as a huge victory for me.

The answer to getting distributed and to earn, it turned out, was in my hands all along.

I’m very happy with what I have accomplished on Medium, and I don’t plan to stop posting here anytime soon, but I’m ready to leave if it ever becomes unsustainable, or not worth my time. As I have adapted to Medium before, I’m ready to adapt out of Medium if necessary.

I see success on Medium as something I have to earn every day, with every new story, not as something I get comfortable with and take as a given. I’ve said it three times by now, but I’ll say it one more time, louder for those sitting in the back: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

Every time I publish a story, I have high hopes for how far it might go, but I don’t know how far it will go. I can’t know. All I can do is hope.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned on Medium is that there’s no use in raging against the system. Every second I spend angry that someone else’s garbage post was curated while one of my babies is being ignored is one second I’m not using to write the next post that might go viral. Every time I think it’s unfair that another writer is making more money than I’m making, I’m jeopardizing my own future earnings. If I ever get to the same level, will I still cry “unfair?” I don’t think so.

I’d rather put my head down and work than try to frame everything that’s not going my way as “unfair.”

And I strongly advise you to do the same.