Medium... Substack... Medium... Substack...

How do you decide which writing platform is better?

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

A long time ago, I realised I love writing. I also love dogs.

For a long time, I was a dog behaviourist, and I wrote a lot.

I started writing on Medium. I wrote all about dogs and dog behaviour over there. It was so easy. I felt important and like my words would mean something. I wrote about snippets of my life, too.

I then wrote a book about dog behaviour.

I started a Substack. I wrote about dog behaviour here too.

In between working with hundreds of dogs in person and thousands more online, helping them with their anxious and fearful behaviours, I wrote.

Then, my life changed, and I was forced to change careers.

Grief.

I kept losing family members, which almost broke me. It was relentless.

My darling heart dog Moo and my Nan died on the same day. My dog was the reason I got into behaviour, and I helped look after my Nan, who had been my closest family member for a lifetime. This left an enormous hole in my world and ripped out my soul for a while.

Then an aunt and two uncles.

My poor Dad, who was lost to Parkinson’s and Dementia, right as he should have been retiring and enjoying his life.

(Then, more recently, I’ve also lost another uncle, who also happened to be my Godfather.)

All within four years.

Adenomyosis.

On top of that, I had adenomyosis, and the bleeding got so bad that I was scared to stand in a field or sit on a client’s sofa for fear of that dreaded gush of blood, which often made an appearance running down my thighs. (I’ve had an operation since then, which helped but has not solved the situation entirely.)

My writing became less focused and more chaotic over time, and eventually it fell by the wayside. I was embarrassed to call myself a writer. I burned out and could barely write a sentence, and even then it took me enormous willpower to bother. Eventually, I cracked and deleted everything. All of the body of work that I had built up over most of a decade was gone in a few clicks of a button. Websites full of work, blogs of thousands of carefully SEO optimised words, PDF resources, instructional videos, everything just gone.

Do I regret it? No. I needed to reset, without it all hanging around my neck like a noose, reminding me of how hard I had worked and how I had to move on.

But recently, I have missed writing. Not for work reasons. I teach ESL online and have another Substack for my Confidence-First English™️approach. Writing for work doesn’t scratch the creative itch. But for my own thoughts, journaling, and ranting about whatever got on my wick that particular day.

I will also confess to speeding up the writing process for work by using AI as an editor. My work is always my own, but work is work, and being creative is being creative, and it’s too easy to confuse the two things and burn out. So if AI helps me get my work done quickly on my work pages, and rambling incoherently helps me get my thoughts on a personal page, then I will continue to shamelessly do both concurrently.

Medium Exists.

So I half-heartedly rehashed my personal Substack, this one, back together and started spluttering the odd story onto it. But Medium exists, and I can never make up my mind which I prefer. Medium or Substack.

I put together a Medium account today.

No idea what I want to use it for. I only know that I want to write again. Being greedy, I can’t decide between the two websites, so I choose both. I could use a personal blog, but I like the community aspects of Substack and the replies on posts that come with using Medium.

What do other bloggers and writers use?

I’ve seen so many writers who use both, but why? What is the benefit of using more than one platform?

Medium.

Medium has a built-in audience. You do not need to chase readers, and you can easily read hundreds of stories about things that interest you. You can leave replies to the stories, highlight parts that you found interesting, and share to social media, etc as you see fit.

There are also monetisation options. If you pay a monthly fee, you can read paywalled stories, and if you have been a member for more than three months and have published more than six stories, then you can also easily paywall your own work.

You can pay extra for the “friends” tier, and that will mean that writers get MORE money from your read than they would from a normal member. So they flock to your profile, which will have a handy heart badge to show you are worth commenting on more often, giving you a larger audience more quickly. Or maybe that is just me being cynical?

Some writers do OK at it, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone who makes a living from Medium alone. Many use it as a vehicle to sell other products through a Gumroad store or similar platform.

Readers can also “clap” your work to show they liked it.

Sadly, the app has never worked properly on my phone, and while I can read stories, I can only reply to them while on a laptop.

Also, you do not own your email list, and should you ever be kicked off, leave, or the website disappears, your readership might well disappear with it.

Substack.

Substack is great if you enjoy the “Notes” aspect, want chat features, want to upload/create videos and blog posts, and have a page of your own that feels more like a website. Many people use it successfully as a website, and the newsletters sent to your email list are great not only for article writing but also for education and for selling to existing readers and subscribers.

Monetisation is easy, and you set your own terms on what you monetise. Want people to pay for video content but to be able to read the written part of your newsletter? Easy. Want to create a paid publication to coexist with your free one -go for it. Paid chat with exclusive access to you? Done. Set your own prices and bonuses, and do it as often as you please.

There is one reasonable payment to make if you want to use your own domain, and Substack will not charge you anything thereafter. Well, at least until you have paid subscribers, at which point it takes a small cut from your subscriptions at source. You do not pay for anything else personally.

The drawback is that you have to work your tits off to gain an audience; no matter who tells you it’s easy, I promise it is not.

Both.

Many people use both. They use Medium to grow their audience, then send them to Substack, where they can collect their email addresses, send more content, and ultimately build stronger relationships with them as either readers or clients.

None of this matters.

None of this matters a jot if you are simply writing for the sake of writing, as getting an audience would not really matter. But we all secretly hope to become the next big author, even if we do not admit it, and we all want a bit of validation from time to time. If we didn’t, we would be writing somewhere away from the public eye and not using Grammarly to double-check our spelling as we go.

Do YOU have both Medium and Substack?

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