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Stop Chasing Quantity and Start Creating Quality
This Week In Writing, we discuss Medium’s new Boost program and why the vast majority of submissions lately have been atrocious.
“Do you lean into quantity or quality?” It’s a never-ending debate across any community of writers. I’ve always answered the question by saying writers should focus on consistently producing high-quality work. It’s a bit of a “best of both worlds” statement. Today, I’m refining my position: Quantity is a fool’s errand.
I’ve shared The Writing Cooperative’s publishing acceptance rate for the past few weeks. This past weekend we hit a new low: 20%.
An unprecedented 32 submissions (30%) this week were articles already published on Medium that had little or nothing to do with writing. Previously published articles don’t receive a new publication date when accepted into a publication; they just get added to the timeline whenever they were originally published. Even if I did accept one of these stories, they wouldn’t show in the timeline. So, what’s the point?
To make things worse, almost all of these previously published stories that had nothing to do with writing were submitted by two writers. In a rare move, I revoked their submission privileges without notice.
What does this have to do with the quality vs. quantity debate? Well, just about all of these previously-published submissions were published on Medium in the last few days.
There’s a lot of advice out there telling writers to publish daily — I’ve even published a fair share in The Writing Cooperative. It’s important to note that I often publish things I disagree with. The publication is geared to advise all writers, my opinions notwithstanding.
That said, let me clarify: Writing daily is terrible advice. While I believe it’s important to write as often as possible, there’s no way anyone other than a paid professional journalist should publish daily. Full stop.
If you want to be a successful writer, one who builds an audience of readers, you must dedicate yourself to quality. It doesn’t matter how often you publish if it’s uninteresting or unreadable. Yes, we all have to start somewhere, and we get…
