My Five Most Fan-Liked Medium Stories of 2020
If you observe closely, you will be no wiser than I am, probably
Since Roz Warren published the list of her most-popular stories, I thought I would borrow the idea.
Roz used Reads as a metric, which makes sense because she gets paid for her articles based on reading time. Me, I still haven’t joined the Medium Partner Program, so I get paid in ego-boosts, not bucks. So in descending order of Fans who clapped once or more for my stories, we have:
Conversation with My Wife (179.1)
I started doing write-ups of funny, strange, or cute items from our mail catalogs back in May 2017. It’s an easy schtick, and people get some chuckles. Like most of my Conversations, this was published in The Junction edited by Stephen M. Tomic.
So why did only one of the catalog stories end up in the top five? Beating one from the beginning of the year, which had a longer chance at more eyeballs? No idea. (This will be a recurring theme through the rest of this list, by the way.)
Who Were You, Little Girl?
Poetry, as many have kvetched, is not what anyone would call a top eyeball catcher on Medium. This was published on Other Voices (aka Geezer Speaks) which is a nice poetry corner that Mike Essig set up years ago, but it doesn’t get new stuff very often. But what Mike published tends to be quality, so there’s that.
The poem itself is a little odd, based on a not-quite-dream I had where I saw our daughter watching us from the foot of our bed one morning. Except we’ve never had a daughter. I couldn’t even tell you what she looked like, I just knew she was ours. Part of the poem comes from looking for the illustration; when I saw the twist of smoke, white on black, it matched the feeling I had when the not-quite-dream ended. Not vanished in a puff of smoke so much as gradually being there less and less, and then not there at all… almost.
Where I Write
This was prompted by Kathy Jacobs, from her I Challenge You pub.
This one is an easy audience-pleaser when most of the audience is made up of writers. We like to see how other writers get stuff done, or get a guilty pleasure finding out how they don’t always. (OMG, the photo of my desk is almost as bad as my desk currently. Okay, time to add “Clean up office” to the list of things to do!)
Conversation with My Wife (167)
Bashing Walmart… not quite shooting fish in a barrel, but almost. Also published in The Junction.
Besides basic humor (making fun of Wally World is pretty basic, no?) it was also a chance to see how other people were dealing with the Trump Pandemic. (Not all that well, at that particular place and time.)
Conversation with My Wife (163)
People like cute kids, especially of they don’t have to deal with them directly themselves. Since this was set in our backyard, I submitted it to Dennett for her Weeds & Wildflowers publication.
I suspect that a photo of a cute little kid is almost as big a draw as a cute puppy. No data to back that up, of course.
Conclusions
My Conversations with My Wife are a known brand for people who have read almost any of my stuff. While people never know exactly what they are going to get (Deb and I talk about a lot of things; I really like being married to my best friend) the topics are usually light and seldom very long. Hence three out of five articles are Conversations.
So if I want more people — okay, more Medium members and others who can clap, mostly the highly heterogenous group Deb & I refer to as “my Medium peeps”—I need to stick to existing publications. The highest story that was not in a publication came in at number 16 out of 114. (So should I submit the story you’re reading now to The Junction? Nah, Matt has a pending Conversation there now, so it could be a week or so until this makes it to the top of the pile. That’s the flip side of submitting to quality pubs, they don’t just churn out crap. Thanks, Matt!) Lucky for me there are quite a few good pubs to choose.
Also, getting data for comparative analysis from Medium seems harder than it should be. I basically copied the stats page from Medium and pasted into a spreadsheet, which got me titles and basic numbers, but no dates, size of story, subtitles, or other useful bits. Maybe there’s more data to Medium Partners? I would hope so!
