Writing on Medium: Month 3

A Bit of Housekeeping and Trying Something New.

Photo by the Author.

I was bound to reach this point: the need for housekeeping.

It’s not something I particularly enjoy — it reminds me of all that time you can spend trying to set up a new social media account (do not get me started on LinkedIn!) which, in hindsight, really shouldn’t take you that long.

But then you end up spending hours on it.

Unnecessary hours.

That was where I found myself most of this month on Medium. I hadn’t really set up everything properly before and I figured it was about time.

My About Me page and Boosted Stories page have finally been published, pinned, and organised on my Medium profile — and boy does it feel good to have that done and dusted! Now my profile looks up to scratch (before I inevitably lose myself beneath the mounds of articles and stories, no less).

As a result of my pining over that About Me page, it has been another month of slow progress.

I was also bogged down by some interesting research, so I was engrossed in books for the most part; but on the flip side, it’s given me some cool ideas for upcoming articles in May.

We take what we can get, as they say!

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Statistics

Let’s get into it, shall we?

For starters, my audience (despite my lack of posts this month) continued to grow by 62 new readers — pushing the total closer and closer to 1.3k!

I can’t thank you all enough.

As for the monthly views and reads? Well, notably they’re a bit below what I normally receive, but that much was accepted. The views to readership numbers, however, have remained as consistent as always with an impressive 2:1 ratio.

Apart from my last writing update, I was only able to publish two new stories in April; their presence, however, is quite noticeable when looking at the above graph — the two “peak areas” (~8th and 20–22 April) denoting the rough timeline for those publications.

Interesting to notice: the first peak didn’t do nearly as well as the second.

This is mostly because, unfortunately for me, that first article did not get boosted; which was also surprising since it was one of my book articles which usually do very well.

Alas, you win some and you lose some!

Even more surprising to me, however, was that second peak.

I tried something new: I wrote a humour piece. A satire piece, to be precise, published in Jane Austen’s Wastebasket which I just recently joined.

(That being one of the greatest names for a humour publication — I absolutely love it!)

And, as goes with trying new things, I was nervous to see how it did; what I wasn’t expecting was it to do so well.

And when I mean well, I mean it has already become one of my most popular articles to date. So colour me surprised! I guess I’m not too bad with humour.

The contrast between the boosted article and non-boosted article is like night and day.

As I mentioned in my previous update, having a backlog is really fantastic; and this month has proven just that since half of all my views and reads still come from all my other articles published in previous months.

Earnings

Similarly, that backlog contributed towards my earnings which amounted to a $79,47 total.

Of that total, my backlog contributed $18,23 to the total with my satirical piece bringing in the mammoth share at $60,89!

Note: the calculated amounts (for April) do not take into account the Lifetime earnings.

So, in the end, despite slacking much of this month, my one-hit wonder helped me to maintain a decent earning (just over half of what I usually do).

Naturally, in this regard, an important takeaway has occurred to me:

If you want to try something new, the fear of failure will always haunt you; but that fear may be unwarranted, and you’ll never know unless you try.

You miss all the shots you don’t take.

I can attest to that.

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Thanks again to all my readers and followers! If you want to support my work further, feel free to check out the blog on Medium. I hope to hear more from you in the future!