3 Little Ducks For Medium And Substack

A new feature at Medium, a tip for single story billing at Substack, and the results of my Substack experiment from last week.

Know what I love about these conversations on Substack? Because that’s how I think of them. As conversations, more than a newsletter.

I love that they’re completely different than what I do on Medium. On Medium, I just write. Personal essays, book reviews, tech stuff like things you didn’t know about AI or ChatGPT or whatever. Here? We talk about all the background stuff that goes along with being a writer.

I like that because it gives me a space to share what I’ve learned. What works. What doesn’t. To me, that’s really important. Because it’s hard. There’s too many people pushing the idea that it’s real easy. And it’s not. It’s not easy at all.

I’ve always been the kind of person who tries really hard to get my ducks in a row. You know? Learn what I need to know before diving in. Try improve my odds and all that good stuff. Thing is, sometimes the ducks are in someone else’s pocket.

Sometimes you don’t even know there are ducks missing.

For example. This week one of my readers reached out and asked if I could add some kind of tipping feature to Medium because she wants to give me a holiday tip.

After I picked myself off the floor, I went and looked at Ko-Fi.

Know what I learned? It’s not just for tipping.

That’s what I thought it was. Just for tipping. But no. As I read the site, I realized I can use it to let people just pay for one newsletter here.

Oh hello, ducky.

Because that’s been a real issue for me with going paid. I want to write more in depth tutorials, put those behind a paywall because we all need to eat.

But I know that Substack isn’t like Medium. There, you pay $5, read like it’s a breakfast buffet. Eat all you want. But here, readers can only pay for so many subscriptions. Being able to offer both options? That’s gold. Hello little missing ducky.

So if you’ve been wanting to offer single-issue payments, that’s how you can do it. Sure, there are other ways. Paypal and Gumroad. But they’re more setup. Ko-Fi makes it easier. They just give you a link. Pop in the link, voila done. And it goes through the same Stripe as you’re already using for Substack payments.

So that’s the first ducky. Two more.

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Medium just set up a new feature. It’s so new they aren’t even done rolling it out, but it’s featured stories at the publication level. It’s not part of Boost, so you know. Every publication will be able to feature one story per week, four per month and they’ll get a little bump in views and distribution.

There are two reasons I like that feature. First is obvious— as a publication editor, it’s nice to have yet another way to be able to give strong writers more visibility.

But there’s another thing that occurred to me after the notice went public. Woke up this morning and went to check if it’s on my account yet because the roll out is gradual. It’s not, but here’s what occurred to me.

I hope it inspires writers in a good way. I hope it makes them ask themselves what it would take to write “the story of the week” for any given publication. Because that’s what it amounts to, right? As an editor, every week I’m going to look at what came in through the week and ask myself, which is the story of the week? Feature that one.

It’s so easy to get disgruntled at platforms and publishers and boost and algorithms and all that stuff, but when push comes to shove growth always comes from focusing on what “we” can do better. Not what someone else is or isn’t doing

Now it’s personal. Because it’s not some unknown curator or algorithm. It’s an editor we know. It’s personal. And if I sit back and ask myself what it would take to bring Roman or Deb or Patty or Tom the story of the week, I think that’s a good thing.

You can read more about it here

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Last little ducky. Last week I said I was doing an experiment. For the entire week, I was not posting anything promotional. No follow me, no read my stuff. Instead, the plan was to share two other writers on Substack who are doing work I admire.

That post shot up to my top five real fast, which made me happy. Especially the comments. Seems like a lot of us are tired of shouting into the void.

I promised to come back and tell you the results of that little experiment and I’m happy to say it was wonderful. Just over the top wonderful.

If you were to look at my notes, you’d think it was a dud. Many of the notes don’t even have more than a handful of hearts. But it wasn’t a dud at all. Know what happened? I got a giant jump in people recommending me.

In a way, that really humbled me. Because I didn’t see it coming.

Here’s what got me. Time after time, I’d give someone a shoutout. Write a little blurb and then re-stack a post I liked. And some of them were moved enough that a total stranger gave them a shoutout that they recommended me right back.

Which just goes to show that in a world make of screaming into the void and trying to be heard, when we stop yelling look at me and tell someone else “hey, I like what you’re doing” they often return one kindness with another.

Kind of renews my faith in humanity a little bit.

Love to know what you think!

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If you like my writing, I also write on Medium

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