The Tacky Side of Writers Talking About Money

It’s the craft we’re interested in. Bragging about your bank account isn’t writing.

The issue of bragging about incomes from writing on Medium keeps coming up, and I’m going to weigh in. I apologize in advance if feelings are hurt, and I do understand that there are two sides to this, but I’ve been sitting on this for a long time and I see no signs of it slowing down. So here goes:

Medium isn’t like other publications, where writers have a general idea of pay rates before submitting. Medium writing income is a crap-shoot. While someone can make thousands of dollars in a single month, others, no matter how hard they try, may never exceed that magical hundred-dollar mark.

We don’t get accepted to write here, we’re allowed to write here. The door opens whenever we want it to. There are no contracts, no promises, no obligations. It’s simply a space to publish our writing. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to get paid for it.

Stories of personal income are not relevant here, no matter how much someone would like to think they’re inspiring other writers. There is no formula to follow. One person’s story about how much money they’ve made has no bearing on anyone else’s income.

Some Medium writers admit they’re here to make money, and I have no quarrel with that. But when I see newbies and others who aren’t so lucky lamenting all over the place because they haven’t found that magic button, when I see major concentration going toward how much or how little we writers make here at Medium, I worry that the trend is bringing Medium down as an outlet for quality writing.

If there’s one thing that disappoints me most about Medium, it’s the culture surrounding the amount of money made here. This is the only large venue open to writers where bragging about incomes earned is encouraged. Medium may feel it benefits them by showing potential writer/customers how easy it is to make tons of money simply by writing things, but every time I see another article about how much money a writer has pulled in, it screams ‘content mill’ and I want to hide them in case readers from the outside should happen on them and think that’s all there is to this amazing place.

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