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Is Fiction Worth Posting On Medium?
Considering uploading serial installments of my shorter novels.
Some years ago I wrote an article on an old defunct blog of mine titled, “Why Does Fiction Fail On The Internet?” To which I hastily received a reply from some lady boasting about how she was not only having loads of success posting her fiction online, but was in fact making a living off of it, and how I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, so there.
This was in the mid-2000s. During the heyday when you could hurl any piece of garbage with the right SEO configuration and it would rank on Google almost instantly. Back before search engines got smart and all content got siloed onto mega tech prison yards like Facebook and Reddit, etc. It was before Amazon KDP and self-publishing became systematic, mainstream, and an accepted (and even profitable) way of disseminating one’s imaginary constructions. My question was in good faith. At the time, fiction was still largely the domain of traditional publishers. You found stuff to read at the library, or at Borders (R.I.P.) or Barnes & Noble. You didn’t think to go online for it. Even Stephen King saw limited success of his novel The Plant, which he posted exclusively in serial installments on the web back in the ’90s. It’s not like short stories or whole novels were the things going viral. It was top…
