When my boss told me about Medium and their Partner Program, I’ll admit that I felt skeptical. You mean you can write and make money simply by posting your thoughts to this nebulous entity that seems like Wordpress, but isn’t? Is there really any chance people are going to read your stuff? Jennie, are you gaslighting me? (Sorry, Jennie).
I thought, there must be a catch, which is why I annoyed Jennie into talking to me about it for a good 20 minutes in her office when she could have been doing more important things.
Not that I didn’t trust Jennie. After all, she’s a director of English Composition at the university where I work. She clearly knows her stuff, especially about writing. And she writes cool stuff that goes viral on Medium pretty frequently.
I was just scared to get excited because well, we all know that trying to earn money from writing is a crapshoot, and I’ve gotten too excited about my potential for “making it” at times in the past.
Once I started writing on Medium, though, I got super excited, and now Medium has turned into what is likely an unhealthy obsession for me. The amount of money I’d make from writing stuff didn’t even matter, and still doesn’t. Obviously, I check those stats all day erry day like nobody’s business, and last week I got pretty worried when it said $0.00 until well past 5 pm on Wednesday evening, even though I did have some positive reception (read: support from Jennie). But when it did update to all of $6.57 for articles that I probably spent around 4 hours total writing, I’d never been so excited for six bucks in my life. People hear my ideas and throw some quarters my way? Great! Added bonus.
Since I’ve started writing on Medium two weeks or so ago, I’ve seen several articles that criticize Medium’s open paywall approach — Medium’s only doing it as a last-ditch effort to save themselves, they’re prioritizing certain ideas over others, their approach results in clickbaity articles that only work to validate people’s previously held beliefs. The articles I saw most often about it, though, were griping about payment (or lack thereof). It’s inconsistent, it only works for a little while, it’s basically pennies for hours of work.
While there is a lot of truth to the above statements, I find myself wondering if any of it really matters, and why it does, particularly re: payment. I understand concerns about propaganda way more than the stuff about payment, but Medium does have curators to help avoid pushing forward baseless articles with intolerant viewpoints. (Read their guidelines and approach here).
But Medium sometimes pays pennies?
So what?
Call it self-deprecating if you want, but to me, any money thrown my way, even one penny, for my writing is an added bonus. I write because I like to. I write because I care about the issues I write about. I write because I want to foster productive conversation about issues I find important. I write because I want others who might feel isolated to know that someone, somewhere, understands them, supports them, and can validate their experiences. I write to name things that I can’t verbally, and to try to name things that others have trouble articulating, too.
The thing I appreciate about Medium is that it gives you a platform for voicing your ideas and engaging with other thinkers and writers without having to go through a lengthy publishing process that is an even bigger crapshoot than trying to get claps from people when you might not have a popular take on your topic. You don’t have to submit articles (in the traditional sense), you don’t have to wait weeks and weeks to hear back and bemoan the fact that by the time you do hear back, your article is irrelevant anyway and will probably be rejected solely for that reason. And a lot of the time, when you send stuff out to publications, if you do get accepted, you’re not paid, or if you are you’re paid once.
In other words, with Medium, you can get your thoughts out there right away, and you can profit off of them (I hate using the term “profit,” here, but for the sake of clarity, I will) in ways that you can’t with other publications. Obviously, you probably have to be a whiz at understanding algorithms to make a living at it, and you probably don’t want to see writing for Medium as a reliable source of income. But Medium can help you out, even if it’s not as much as you’d like.
Take me for an example. I’m an adjunct instructor at a 4-year school. I love my job (I’m not just saying this in the case that Jennie’s still reading), which is why I take on what’s considered overload instead of pursuing a better paying full time job. The only problem with my job, then, is that I have to do it too much in order to pay my bills, and if I get behind financially, there’s no catching up. We’re paid monthly, and almost every month, I fall short, and the last three days of the month, my car is literally on E and I eat bread butts for breakfast.
This falling short happens for a variety of reasons — bad pay, the high rent cost in the apartment I’m living in, and the fact that I’m not good yet at budgeting for pay that I receive once a month. I often underestimate how much I need and don’t understand how to plan for unexpected events, and unexpected events seem to happen every month because I have three pets, a shitty car, and a lot of copays due for maintaining my mental health.
All of these things are issues I’m working on remedying, but in the meantime, Medium is really helping me. $6.57 is a lot for someone whose bank account comes up negative almost every month. $6.57 can mean a bag of groceries or a few cans of dog food. $6.57 can mean enough gas to help get me to campus. $6.57 can mean not crying because I see myself as a stupid failure because of my financial circumstances, despite the fact that I have a graduate degree, fairly decent teaching evals, and creative writing publications.
Sometimes, $6.57 is worth more than $6.57. It’s all in how we see it. Is it actually worth it?
It’s up to you. Only you can determine what you think your writing is worth, or what it should be worth. But for me, Medium is worth it, whether it pays pennies or not.
So thanks, Jennie, for telling me about this opportunity to share ideas and earn some pennies in the process.
And thanks, Medium for making it happen.
