Q&A #4 - "Frozen" on Substack use, abandoning Medium, and dormant blogs
another question for our Q&A series
At this point in the year, for the past few years, we’ve gone through a series of Q&A. This is the 4th in this series. If you have a question, please email it to me alison@alisonacheson.com or post in comment section.
Susan’s question: I have become completely flummoxed, frustrated, and therefore frozen about how to use Substack, whether to abandon Medium (and, if so, what about my posts there—and the same with my long dormant original blog). Basically, how do I consolidate and establish a strong identity in one or maybe two, locations?
I suspect this question hits home for many. It connects, too, with the first question in this series, on income streams, and how to shape one’s writing career.
In my friend Walter Rhein’s Substack, he often looks closely at this question and his thoughts are valuable as he is “successful” on both Substack and Medium—that is, he does indeed create a living! You might want to check out his words.
Let’s look at these three, the strengths and weaknesses, and how you might make decisions, and create your writing identity. I’ve also asked Susan to clarify her overarching goals (see below).
Medium — thoughts on…
Medium has waves. Its most recent wave was with a program called “boost.” The company decided to eschew algorithms and hire RHB—real human beings—to handpick stories they thought deserving of an extra push onto readers’ pages. These stories would earn more as they would receive more views/reads (the basis for Medium pay).
I was working as one of these nominators, and received a small sum per successful nomination. It was extremely rewarding to find undiscovered writers with strong work, and nominate and see them earn some deserved dollars. Too, a “boosted” story would earn substantially more. For over a year, Medium was a place to make a bit of money for one’s writing.
At the moment, Medium’s in a wave of ‘wane.’
Whether in wax or wane, publishing regularly Medium, and working with publications, as well as doing the community piece—reading others’ works, and posting comments and responses to comments on your work—is all key on that platform.
To make Medium work for you, post excerpts from your longer-form. I’ve re-posted excerpts from my published memoir (with permission from the publisher), as well as other pieces connected to the subject matter in one way or another (ALS, caregiving, ageing). I’ve posted pieces that began as my personal thoughts in my journal, and then decided to develop further, and further again, for a public eye. I’ve learned from this process, and ended up with a collection personal essays.
Check out the work of Ryan Frawley for the best examples of this.
My years on Medium have been well-spent. It’s a place to develop voice, thought, and work ethic. Identity grows from this.
I remember, Susan, first stumbling over your work—how delighted I was as a nominator to discover your words! Original and quirky. I also remember wanting to read more!
No, I’m not suggesting you stay with Medium. But I do want you to know that your work stood out to me.
We’ll keep going here…
Substack
I’m here. I’m happy to be here. I know how expensive it is to create one’s own website (some years ago I had a site called Writers’ Web Workshop for which I paid significantly to have developed). I know how challenging and time consuming it is to consistently promote to bring people to one’s own site. With Substack so much is built-in. People have a chance of finding you. That said, it’s tough—I’m not going to say otherwise. I reached out to all of my dozen-plus years of ex-students to get started four years ago, as well as readers and others, and it’s still taking years to shape.
Having your own site
If you have a huge following, have won substantial awards, have some name recognition, and so on, you might be able to sustain your own site. I have to remind myself to update my own sites. (After I published my memoir, I realized I needed to split into one for adult readers and one for young people. Was that a good decision? It means twice as much to up-date.)
Putting it together to answer the question…
End goal? To write on such a platform? To write elsewhere or as well? To write book-length work?
I sent an email for clarification. And Susan responded, letting me know that she is indeed working on a longer, full-length project, for which she’d like to develop an audience. She also has several interests she’d like to explore, and she’d like for each piece to resonate with personal learning… and in doing this, create audience interaction that goes beyond superficial social media interaction.
Worthy goals. And a lot of work.
Many of us can relate to the above clarification (my paraphrasing).
Long-term goals and short-term. Important to connect the two, and to determine which is—at the moment—leading the way, and why.
When I first started posting to Medium, what was most driving me was the push to be able to leave my teaching position. At that time, I wrote with what I’ll call crazed regularity. Yet compared to many who write regularly for such platforms, my output was not so much at all. There are those who write more than one piece each day. Every day.
I can’t write that much, mostly because each piece is a distraction from my long-form work, and my thinking becomes so fragmented that work is not sustainable.
Medium vs Substack
I maintain a presence on both, though I’ve chosen to focus on Substack. In the past 6-8 months, I post very little to Medium. In fact, what I post to Medium is a small number of re-posts with the purpose of letting Medium readers know my Substack exists… really, that’s it.
And I continue to post to Medium because of the wonderful people I’ve met. Without their connection, it would be easy to walk away.
That said, as above, Medium has waves. I have no idea when it might take a turn and even less idea of what a turn might look like. So to maintain a presence, especially one that doesn’t take much time, might be useful. The keys are “might be useful” and “not much time.”
Substack—and the Unschool—is something I enjoy. It’s not easy to produce a post every week. And for the first two years, I was posting every five days, and that was too much.) But what I have built here means a great deal to me. It represents time and community, as well as a small but fairly steady income stream.
For me, it speaks to Susan’s quest for deeper communication and something that supports her longer-form efforts. That’s how it functions for me.
Personal Blog
Long before there were writing platforms, I maintained a fairly regular blog—even as I was teaching full-time and writing fiction regularly. I have slowly begun to re-post a number of my Medium pieces, and would like to, eventually, move all of them over—or at least all that have some personal nature. I have a number of essays about women who have been significant role models in my life, relatives, neighbours, and others… pieces I don’t want to lose.
A digression: One thing I do frequently, is to download all the work I have posted to Medium. I do this in the event the platform disappears at some point. You can also do this here on Substack. It feels a bit like paranoia but—as you know—posting essays and articles represents hours of your life. And you don’t know how you’ll use the material in the future. So do this routinely. (The how-to: on Substack, go to “settings,” next to the left-hand column, and click import/export, and click on “export your data.” Easy. Also easy, is Medium: click on your icon, upper left-hand corner, then “settings,” then “security and apps,” and finally, “download your information.”)
Review…
It’s the nature of Medium to be a mix. Even though all the “advice” says to “niche” —what a tiresome word!—if you need a skating rink next to your baseball diamond adjacent to your snowboard terrain in order to play as you most like, then Medium works for you. I do think that a Substack newsletter has to have more focus or at least an umbrella of some kind. As for a personal blog, it’s problematic to find a way to bring an audience to your personal blog, and to find a way to be compensated.
Susan ends her questions with a thought about the need to publish consistently with regularity.
YES! This is key to all platforms. It’s also key to developing the habits for the creating (and completion) of any long-form and independent-of-platform projects.
…of “frozen”
With each platform or form of social media or new device, there’s a learning period. That’s followed by a time of working enough within for it to become intuitive. I’m not yet intuitive with “Notes” here on Substack. I don’t know it I ever will be! Part of that is my own resistance. Part of my resistance is my resentment over the amount of precious time spent on things that simply don’t matter to me—not when my stories are waiting to be written. I also don’t feel intuitive about the Substack app. When I started, only four years ago, it was much simpler here. I was able to read carefully through the posted info and follow step-by-step.
Now I find the “help center” to be my go-to:
https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us
Use as the starting place for your questions. Otherwise, one can get quite lost in the posts and opinions.
I had to dedicate quite a bit of time to working through. I’m not tech-savvy.
Is there a reason, other than the tech piece, that Substack is creating a sense of “frozen”?
~~~
To sum:
How much time do you have? And how much mental and emotional stamina do you have to maintain more than one platform/focus?
Can you actually split your time evenly—or in some way—between two, three, or even more platforms? (Why would you—can you articulate that?) Can you see how the work can over-lap—so you’re not writing completely disparate pieces? And have a quality of “leading home”—to the work that is closest to your heart? With a selling or non-selling tone that is comfortable for you?
Are the differences in audience and approach for each platform clear to you? Do you see advantages and disadvantages in each? And, more importantly, what works best for your goals?
If being “frozen” wasn’t an issue, which ONE platform would you choose for focus? (Even if/as you maintain the others?)
I’m assuming “frozen” is about the tech piece, a lack of familiarity, and/or the “unknown,” and I’ve set up a thread with the focus of navigation.
https://unschoolforwriters.substack.com/p/a-substack-thread-for-questions-about/comments
Interestingly (?) it was impossible to post this as a link—even after MANY tries, closing and reopening. You’ll have to copy and paste—with apologies.
For me, the biggest question is always: how much time do I need for the work that brings me the most satisfaction?
The second most sizable question is: what do I need to do to be able to financially make that happen?
After that—the prioritizing—the other pieces tend to fall into place.
~~~
The first in our Q&A series is connected in that it’s about the business side of writing.
Thanks for the mention Alison!
I still can't pull the trigger on Substack. Frankly, I'm finding it hard to keep posting on Medium at the minute, too. Writing has its seasons, and for reasons I don't fully understand, I'm in a quiet season right now. It'll pass.
I have over 400 articles on Medium, so I could start posting them all to Substack. But I don't have much faith that it would do any good. I'm the literary equivalent of leafy greens; I need a Curator-type authority to force eyeballs my way.
So much nutritious food for thought here, Alison!
I phased out my active use of Medium over the last year. Which makes it sound more organised and planned than it was. It would be more honest to say I simply lost heart, in the face of falling reader numbers – and recognition that quid pro quo is not a sustainable model for building them back up.
Yet an emotional attachment to the platform remains. Medium is in large part to thank for the fact that I write fiction at all. I used to have a community there; now it's full of ghosts. In some cases, literally.
I like to write the occasional discursive piece, developing a thought about the craft or business of writing into a whimsical ramble. That doesn't belong on my Substack, where I only publish my fiction.
It occurs to me that I could experiment with putting those on Medium again. And indeed, on my WordPress website, where the blog has been languishing for over two years.
I'm in the privileged position of not needing to make money from this. My motivations can therefore be entirely about creative satisfaction – but I only find it satisfying to write for a readership.
There's much about the Substack of 2022 that I like a lot more than the Substack of 2025. I'm wary of the social media aspect of Notes. I restack the occasional comment there, where it vanishes without trace. That's about it. I suspect that making it work for me would require more entrepreneurial enthusiasm than I can sustain. Or want to at this stage in my life.