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  1. AntPoems

    AntPoems Contributor Contributor

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    Is anyone using Medium and/or Vocal?

    Discussion in 'Self-Publishing' started by AntPoems, Jun 20, 2021.

    Hello, all.

    I recently signed up for a Medium account, mostly so that I could submit to their flagship humor publication, Slackjaw. Medium seems like an interesting platform, kind of straddling the line between self publishing and traditional. Naturally I’ve been pondering what else I could do on the service, and I’m hoping some of you will share your experiences. Here’s what I’ve seen so far.

    I’ve published three short humor pieces there so far, and they each got around a dozen views; they’ve earned me a total of about fifty cents. Not exactly Scrooge McDuck money, but it’s still better than they were doing sitting on my laptop, or even in some non-Medium publication with a tiny audience and no pay at all. I went through a second-tier publication that’s not very picky (both in style and, unfortunately, quality), and it looks like my pieces quickly got lost in the flood of posts, so after the first day or so no one saw them. So, it was an interesting experiment. These were all pieces that I thought were decent, but which top publications like McSweeney’s had already passed on (or which were a poor stylistic fit for them), so it’s nice to at least have them online, but I don’t expect to get much out of it until I crack Slackjaw.

    Fiction doesn’t seem to be a big thing on Medium, but it looks like poetry has at least some kind of audience. I doubt there’s much money in it, but there’s no money in poetry anyway. In both cases I’ve seen people claim that they do better publishing on Vocal than on Medium, so I might check that platform out, too, and I’d love to hear from anyone who’s tried it. I enjoy writing light verse and parody, which are the Rodney Dangerfield of poetry, and I’m considering posting some pieces that aren’t likely to find a home anywhere else. The same goes for humorous short fiction, which is another hard sell. Any thoughts?

    Thanks, everyone!
     

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