I have a theory that I’m tempted to test. There are a lot of people who claim you cannot make decent money writing fiction on Medium. And they’re right if you only see curation and direct Medium payments as ways to make income.

I’ve published enough fiction on Medium to know that those stories (at least the kind I tend to write) will never be curated, but that the people who read them like them.

I wonder if I treated publishing short stories on the platform as a way to entertain readers and drive them to my fiction email list if I could make some decent coin directly from Medium, but also sell more books in the future as I write them and sell them to a loyal tribe.

I get a steady income from all of my curated non-fiction stories and I regularly add people to my freelance-focused email list. I also sometimes get a new client or two from curated Medium stories. But, I’d love to better leverage it for the fiction side of my business. Perhaps, writing with the knowledge that there's no way something will be curated anyway is part of the key to that.