How To Use Medium To Promote Your Author Brand And Your Books

How Authors Can Use Medium To Sell More Books

Using Medium to promote your books and brand is an ideal platform for authors.

You can share your writing with more dedicated readers than you might find on other social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

If you like, it is a social network, a little like Twitter, in its ease of connecting with Medium users.

But it is a better choice for publishing stories, long-form articles, and creative writing.

Medium is easy to use

I have used Medium to promote for a long time now. My general impression is that it is beneficial in promoting my author brand. It is a terrific platform for cross-promoting my blogs and articles.

Creating an account on Medium only takes a few minutes. Then a couple of minutes more to create your Medium profile.

All you need to do is take a quick tour and read the FAQs. Once you register your Medium account, you are ready to publish your first article.

Your content on Medium should be long-form articles that are highly informative. It is not a publishing platform that is suited to short and obvious promotional blog posts.

But there are a few things I have learned about Medium. These tips might help you get a head start on achieving the best results from your writing on Medium.

 

Tips for Using Medium

The most popular articles on Medium are generally quite long reads.

Every article has a reading time indicator. Articles above a 7 min read seem to work best.

One important point is that you do not need to write original content for Medium.

You can choose a few of your best long-form blog posts or articles and re-publish them. Think of it as extending the reach of your blog.

People can comment on your articles, which is a great way to extend your author brand. Readers can also reward your articles with a ‘clap.’ It is similar to a ‘Like’ on Facebook.

You can keep track of your progress from your Stats page.

 

medium stats

At a glance, you can see your page views, full reads, read ratio, and the number of fans you have gained.

As you can see from my stats above, you can definitely find new readers on Medium if you publish great content.

Here are a few tips to help you get the best results from Medium.

 

Use Original Images

Like most sites where you want to grab attention, posts on Medium need an image.

This is absolutely vital.

Preferably, you should use an original image.

Copying an image from Google Images is likely to get you an image used by thousands of others, and you may infringe on copyright.

But you don’t need to go out and spend hours taking photos, though.

I use Canva, which is a free online app for creating original images. I used it to create the image at the beginning of this post.

For Medium, make sure you use large images of at least 900px wide. Smaller images don’t tend to attract as much attention.

 

Import or Create Content

One of the key features of Medium is that you can import articles directly from your blog.

It only takes a couple of minutes to import a post from your blog. Then you can make a few edits if necessary and check your formatting options before you hit publish.

You might be concerned about creating duplicate content.

However, most SEO experts seem to agree that posting your already published articles as Medium publications do not cause Google to penalize you for duplicate content in search results.

In my case, I have not seen any SEO problems arising from publishing my existing articles on Medium.

However, I often edit, change, or add extra content to my articles before publishing them on Medium. The readers are a different audience to those who find my blog via Google Search or social media.

The most significant factor to consider when you are publishing on Medium is the quality of the article.

A story on Medium of a good length and well-written can only do your author’s brand a lot of good because people do actually read on this platform.

 

Connecting With Readers

Medium makes it easy to share your story if you have a Twitter account.

When you register, all your Twitter followers who are using Medium will automatically follow you. So you will start with a solid following on Medium.

My tip is to follow back anyone who subsequently follows you on Medium, as this helps you build your following.

Also, reply and engage with Medium readers who comment on your articles. It is, by a long way, one of the best ways to build your author brand.

 

Forget About Promoting Your Books

Using Medium to promote yourself is a great tool. But it is definitely not a place to hard-sell your books.

But as I said, it is a great place to work on your building your author image and sharing your writing and blog posts.

You can add a byline at the end of your articles on Medium. You can also add an embedded link to your website or blog.

I use a couple of different links and get reasonable traffic to my website and blog with them.

You can view one of my articles on Medium to see how I use my byline and blog link.

 

Getting Lucky on Medium

Don’t expect millions of readers as soon as you start writing on Medium.

But after a few weeks, you should start to see a steady flow of new readers on your stats page for your Medium stories.

But you can get lucky, as has happened to me a few times now.

If the Medium algorithm selects one of your articles for the Medium homepage or Editor’s Picks, expect a LOT of readers.

 

Conclusion

I can almost hear you saying that you need a new social media platform like a hole in the head.

But I can honestly say that Medium is very much worth the little extra time investment to boost your author and writer brand.

You can use the import facility from your blog to save a lot of time. Or, if you find reasonable success on Medium, invest a little more time in writing original articles from time to time to try to engage with your new readers.

Oh, by the way. You are, of course, very welcome to follow me on Medium.

 

Related reading: Publish A PDF Article Online For Free Without A Blog

13 thoughts on “How To Use Medium To Promote Your Author Brand And Your Books”

  1. I’ve seen reference to importing what you want to publish from a blog. Why can’t you import a word doc article directly?

  2. Thank you for this article but more importantly for the initiative allowing writers to publish their works. I’am currently writing the very first article of my life and looking for platform that can allow me publish it. I’am curious to know if I could do it here and what are the practical requirements.
    best wishes!

    1. Avatar for Justin Michael Schmidt
      Justin Michael Schmidt

      Hey… This was very concise and inspiring for future writers and authors. I’m very glad I found this. I had known about the platform but after your straightforward article, I feel better about investing my time into it. Thank you!

  3. This is a great article. I am curious about adding my blogs that specialize in the area of elder care and dying. I have researched your sites and am unclear as to which category my subject would align with.

  4. Thanks for your help on this. I have been on other sites for years writing articles and now books. But I didn’t even know about Medium.
    Great advice,

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