Member-only story
Some Great Reasons To Publish Your Best Online Stories in Book Form
#2: You’ve already written the damn thing
I was looking back over some of my older stories recently, trying to remember if I had written a specific piece about Springsteen (I had), when something struck me. I have written a lot of articles here, nearly 250 as of today. That’s not nearly as many as some who have been on the site longer than me, but it’s still a significant amount. Given the average length of my articles, it’s between 125,000 and 200,000 words total. Since a novel is classified as a work of fiction over 50,000 words, that’s the equivalent of five novel-length works.
This got me thinking. What if I took the best of it and put it into book form? Would it even be worth it? I think the answer for me, and for all of you writers here as well, is a resounding yes. I’ll give you five reasons why.
1. A wider audience. There is no question you can reach a wide audience on Medium. According to a March 2021 Axios article, Medium has 750,000 paying subscribers. There are reportedly 85 to 100 million non-subscribing monthly users, but that includes people who read the three free articles and then bail as well as perhaps many millions who visit the site once and never again, so what matters to us as writers is the 750K actual members.
