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Self Publishing On Medium Works
My conclusions so far
I wrote an article recently inviting a discussion on self publishing versus submitting to one of the Medium publications.
Many people responded. It seems that many writers here self publish, sometimes because they have enough followers who read everything they write. Others have had no luck being accepted by publications or (once accepted) waited for weeks without any response.
I never self published before December 2024. I always thought that submitting to a publication would give me more readers. I decided to run an experiment and self publish almost exclusively for one month.
The Experiment
In December, I published 25 articles. Two were submitted to different publications, the other 23 were self published. I don’t usually write this much, but I had some time this month and also thought I needed a decent number of submissions to really assess the result.
The Result
On average, none of the self published articles did worse. Most did better, some much better. The three best performing articles that got the most views, claps, and comments were self published.
I was very surprised about that. For this month, I will try to balance between the two and see what happens.
I can say, however, that self publishing does not mean that you will have fewer readers, and after all, having others interested in our stories is what we are really here for.
Good luck to you all in 2025! I look forward to publishing more of my articles. I also look forward to reading more stories. I have encountered some gifted writers here.
