Why I Consider Medium to Be the Best Place for a New Writer

And Why It Might Be Right for You

Photo by Drew Perales on Unsplash

In the olden days, say, twenty or thirty years ago, writing was much different. You typed your manuscript or printed it out from WordPerfect. Then you leafed through the thousand or so pages of Writer’s Market looking for magazines that might want to publish your piece. Next, you addressed, stuffed, and posted envelopes and mailed them out, sometimes to multiple markets, often to only one. Then you went back to work on your next piece, while you waited several months to see when or if anyone would get back to you. Most didn’t. If they did, the letter would most likely begin Dear Sir/Madam, and you knew you had missed again.

Then the Web blossomed, and online magazines and blogs became a thing. You could email your work out at the touch of a button and get rejected in weeks instead of months. Sometimes days.

Next came content mills. The demand for content far outstripped the supply, so sites like Constant Content and Demand Media popped up. Now you either wrote articles on demand for things like bumper pool tables and air conditioners, or you wrote what you felt like and put it out there on spec.

This is where I came along. I did some work back in the horse and buggy days but lacked the patience to wait months for…