Oops, New Medium Previews Make Short Reads Free & Call For Stories To Boost

Plus, a tribute to a long time reader who no longer walks among us.

Happy Friday,

Y'all, I’m a bit sad. This morning I had to remove a friend and reader from this list because he lost his battle with cancer. He’d been one of us since early 2022, and read every single thing I sent out. I looked at his stats before I hit remove. Every. Single. Thing. Everything I sent, he read. It was mutual. I read his words, too.

I get it. His family needs to clean his phone. I’m sure they want to save it, with all the funny texts and photos. Not with Substacks and Medium posts flowing in daily. Some parts of having online friends are hard to wrap your heart around.

I wrote a tribute on Medium. The curators declined to boost, which also made me sad because I thought it was a fine piece of writing. It’s called Can You Miss A Man You Never Met, Except In Thousands of Words? Link here, in case you didn’t see it.

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In case you didn’t know, Medium’s new “longer” previews make short-reads free for non-members

Thought I’d share something I recently discovered. It only affects you if you tend to write short reads. Poetry and random musings that are 1-3 mins in read time.

Medium used to give non-members 3 free reads as incentive to join. I don’t know if it wasn’t working or conversion was low, but they scrapped that to try something new.

In September, Medium introduced new “longer” previews.

Now, non-members see a “longer” preview than before, followed by a button that says sign up to read the rest. And on longer reads, that’s exactly how it works.

If you write a 5-minute read, non-members see about 1/3 of your post and then are prompted to sign up. On a 7-min. read they see about 20% before the sign up button appears. I tested about 40 posts in read times from 1-10 minutes.

The free preview appears to range in length from 300-450 words, based on how the post is formatted. Things like images and paragraph length affect how much the non-members get to read free before the join button appears.

The oops happens with short-reads. Non-members can read them free. If your post length is 1-3 minutes, non-members can read them all free. Short reads are pretty much an all-you-can-eat buffet for non-members.

Please note — It’s not that you don’t get paid for member views. You do. If a member reads your short reads, you still get paid. But you’ll draw a lot of non-members.

You’ll see stats like this. The grey part is non-members. These are from posts in my pubs. It’s one thing if you know it’s happening. But it’s quite another if you didn’t know and are stunned, wondering why so many non-member reads.

copyright @lindacaroll — please do not use without requesting permission

If you don’t care, that’s fine. But if you do, it sucks to find out all your poetry is free for non-members to read. You can see it for yourself. Just right click any story and open in an incognito browser. You’ll see exactly what non-members see.

copyright @lindacaroll — please do not use without requesting permission.

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Also, call for stories I can nominate for boost…

It’s only a third through the month and I’m already behind on nominating stories for a boost. My publications have been slow and they’re not big pubs that get dozens of submissions every day to begin with.

Here’s the key. I’m looking for recent. If you’ve written a post in the last 4-6 weeks that you’re really proud of, feel welcome to share in comment. The grapevine tells me curators have been pickier than usual lately, so pick your very strongest unboosted post and I’ll make a list to read over the weekend. Thanks!

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My newest on Medium…

• Can You Miss a Man You Never Met Except in Thousands of Words?

• A Strange Little Story For The Loners And Misfits Of The World

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If you enjoy my writing, please click the heart or share this post. Thanks. :)

xo,
Linda