What My Highest Grossing Story Wasn’t

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

I’m a new writer on Medium. In the past two months, I’ve published around 30 articles with varying degrees of confidence. Like most new writers, I saw the success of those getting thousands of claps and wondered how they did it.

Also like most new writers, I stumbled upon the gnarled amalgamation of self-help articles, listicles, and newsletter promotions showboating guides to success.

Though I often felt like I didn’t get anything out of those articles, I admit to reading a number of them. I tried to take what I learned and reproduce it. For the most part, I failed. I scrambled to find even a handful of views, and though I never came to this platform for money or attention, I felt insecure about my results.

One day after a long, hot shower, I finally wrote my first article that would get any real traction.

After all the writing tips and success stories I read, none of them helped me write my most successful piece. It wasn’t any of the things people told me it would be.

It wasn’t written with Medium members in mind

My piece was a guide to a niche way of playing a specific hero in Dota, a game with few followers on Medium. The idea came to me in the shower about two hours before my usual bedtime, and I would have written it on Reddit in a post if not for the fact that I like the Medium editor so much.

When I finished it, I self-published it immediately. Following that, I posted a link with a TL;DR to the r/Dota2 subreddit expecting little. I hardly intended for Medium members to give it a glance.

It wasn’t researched

Because it didn’t have to be. I was already an expert on what I was writing.

As I said, the idea came to me in the shower and I finished writing the entire 13-min read in under an hour. I didn’t need to do research or pull much data at all because my experience already made me an authority on the topic.

It wasn’t rigorously edited

I read over it twice before I hit submit, once to check tone and content, and again to be sure I didn’t miss anything. After that, I slapped an image at the top of the subject matter and didn’t look back.

While the editing wasn’t rigorous, the content was. It basically wrote itself. Because of that, I was confident in my words. I didn’t feel the need to go back and rearrange words or consider better ways of saying things. The whole piece flew from inception.

It didn’t get a ton of claps or Medium engagement

The story only ended up with 1 clap from a Medium member with no profile picture nor post history. No one responded to the story on Medium.

It did, however, land me substantially more views than any piece I’d written. I’m a new writer, so the 600+ views it generated in two days was a shock to the heart. This was over triple my best story at the time, and it generated those views in two days unlike my other posts, which slowly accumulate views.

On Reddit, it got a ton of engagement. People were bashing my idea, praising it, asking me questions, theory-crafting, sharing it with friends, and more.

It died as fast as it lived

After those first two days, the views dropped off. People stopped discussing it on Reddit, and the views stopped rolling in to match.

I didn’t give it another thought once the spike was over. I said my piece and knew no one would look at it down the line, as the game will change and the information will become irrelevant.

It wasn’t like anything I expected it to be, and yet it was my best.

I’ve spent an entire week on one story, carefully crafting my message into what I believed would be perfect, only to have it fall flat. I’ve spent hours researching topics and looking for feedback with close friends and writing peers.

And yet, discarding all of that and channeling what I knew like the back of my hand for an audience far from my usual target audience ended up yielding my highest grossing story. The sheer flood of views made it my top earner. (Humor me — I’ve only made a few bucks).

Will I write better stories in the future, ones that are refined and draw more attention? Probably. I sure hope so.

What makes this story special is that I wrote it with a passion directed at an audience I related to, not one I catered to. It was a perfect pancake, cooked no more or less than necessary, flipped with unflinching confidence, and flopped onto a warm plate to fill its audience.

There’s something humbling about that, and it rings true with the only advice from all of those self-help articles that did strike a chord with me.

Your best work will come effortlessly and without compromise, channeling you at your most genuine.

The piece: How to Stomp with Aghs Spectre