Why I Write About How Much Money I Make on Medium

This article is both meta and completely irrelevant to most of my readers, but I’ve been thinking about it a fair amount over the past few weeks and wanted to take the time to address it.

There’s been a wave of antagonism lately toward writers who talk about how much money they make on Medium. You know, writers like me. People are saying that these articles are harmful and damaging and that people shouldn’t read them.

The argument goes like this: by writing about how I’m making vast sums of money on Medium, I’m perpetuating this harmful idea that it’s super easy to make loads of money and that you can totally do it too if you only do what I say — when in reality, nobody can promise you money because the only thing you can control is actions, not outcome, so you should put your head down and focus on the quality of your writing because that’s what real writers do.

I have a number of problems with this argument:

1. There Is No Such Thing as a “Real Writer”

In philosophy, there’s a logical fallacy called the No True Scotsman fallacy. Here’s a simplified version from Wikipedia:

Person A: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Person B: “But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge.”
Person A: “But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”

The argument being that since Angus puts sugar on his porridge, he’s not a true Scotsman.

The argument that real writers don’t focus on income is a No True Scotsman fallacy. Writers who care about earning a living from their writing are just as real as writers who are completely unconcerned with how much money they make.

In fact, I think you could make the argument that writers who care about earning an income from their writing are more real since writers who earn a full-time income from their work are writers who…

1. have a lot more time to dedicate to writing, and
2. are a lot more invested in improving their writing ability

…but I think that would be a No True Scotsman fallacy of its own.

2. There Is No Such Thing as a Pure Interest in the Craft

The second part of this argument I’d like to address is the assertion that “real writers write because they love writing”.

To this, I ask… why? Why do you love writing?

At the end of the day, writing is just a medium. There is no such thing as “writing for the love of writing”. You may:

• write fiction because you love telling stories.
• write histories because you are fascinated by the past.
• write in your journal because you love the process of self-exploration.

Nowhere is this clearer than nonfiction. Most nonfiction books are not written by career writers, but by professionals and academics from a variety of industries. They write their books in order to disseminate research, as is the case for Brene Brown and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, or to explore ideas, as is the case for Sam and Annaka Harris. They want their writing to be good, as good writing rarely disseminates knowledge or adequately explores ideas, but good writing is itself not the goal.

All writing has a goal. The goal of the nonfiction writer is usually to share information. The goal of the fiction writer is usually to entertain. The goal of the fanfiction writer is to extend their enjoyment of the original work. The goal of the journal writer is their own satisfaction.

When we pretend there is such a thing as “writing for writing’s sake”, we lose sight of why we write.

That’s not to say writers don’t feel affection for the written word. I certainly do. It brings me great pleasure when I craft an excellent sentence. But ultimately, I am crafting those excellent sentences for a reason; without that reason, my excellent sentences would simply be self-indulgent nonsense.

3. It’s Normal to Want Money

I think part of the antagonism for articles like mine stems from a subconscious belief that doing things we love for money is bad — as if pursuing money sullies the love of what we are doing.

Personally, I think that’s nonsense.

First, I’d like to point out that income on Medium is directly tied to read time. If people read your work on Medium, you make money. The only people who aren’t making any money on Medium are people with no readers. Therefore, on Medium, wanting money and wanting readers are the same thing. I have never met someone who would criticize a writer for wanting more readers.

Second, it’s not unreasonable to want to be paid. Writers work hard to produce stories, and if people are really getting something out of them, it’s completely reasonable to want to be compensated for that. When you shame a writer for wanting compensation for their work, you’re effectively telling them that it’s unreasonable to want compensation. If an employer told me it was unreasonable to want compensation, I’d quit.

Even people who are ostensibly writing for free are still usually getting compensated one way or another. They’re building an email list they can use down the road, or they are using blogging as a way of establishing their expertise on a particular subject. Very, very few people are writing with absolutely no desire for compensation. That is human nature.

Would I still write if nobody paid me? Probably. I was writing in my journals and on fanfiction.net for years before I ever thought of becoming a professional writer. But if I couldn’t get paid for my writing, that’s probably all I would have ever done.

The irony is that many of the people I see criticizing articles like these are people who certainly make a full-time income from their writing. It’s really easy to talk about how you should write “for the love of writing” when your writing is paying you a six-figure salary.

4. Nobody Is Trying to Get Rich Writing

People who criticize these articles are worried about “sellouts”, people who are writing just to get rich. But frankly, I don’t think there are many of those out there. While plenty of writers want to get paid to write, nobody writes for the money. People who want to get rich become investment advisors, or software engineers, or drug dealers, not writers. Writing is much too difficult to be a get-rich-quick strategy.

Writers who want to make money usually have much more humble goals. They love writing so much that they want to make it their full-time occupation so they have more time to spend writing, or they want to use their passion to build a better future for their children, or they want to become a digital nomad. It’s not about the money as much as it is about how the money could make their life better. What’s so bad about that?

5. These Stories Inspire People

Lastly, some have said that articles about how much people make on Medium are discouraging. They say they make get-rich-quick promises that can’t possibly be fulfilled because we can only control our actions, not our outcomes.

I get that some people may find them discouraging, but I have always found them encouraging. When I first started writing for the Partner Program, my favorite thing to do was read articles by Medium hot-shots about how much money they’d made. I’ve probably read every single one on this platform. Reading these stories served a dual purpose:

1. They proved that my dreams were achievable.
2. They showed me the rough outlines of how others achieved what I wanted to achieve.

In fact, it is thanks to articles like these that I even knew people could make a living writing for Medium. Without people talking about their big Medium paychecks, I probably would have never taken Medium seriously in the first place.

Did I think these writers were promising me a get-rich-quick scheme? No. Did their how-to’s work for me? Not always. But I understood my path to success would probably look different from theirs. Mount Everest has been climbed thousands of times, but no two people ever trod exactly the same path doing it. I just wanted to get to the top; I didn’t need to walk the same path.

And get to the top I did. Two years ago, I dreamed of being a digital nomad who made their living on Medium, and now I’m doing it. Writing about how much I made on Medium was my way of saying “I did it”. It’s a big accomplishment, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be proud of it.

I’m not the only person who feels this way. I’ve written two articles about how much I’ve made on Medium, and both received dozens of responses, the vast majority of which were about how my story inspired them the way other stories inspired me. Articles about Medium income may discourage some people, but they certainly don’t discourage everyone.

In Conclusion

You don’t have to enjoy stories about how much people make on Medium. But please recognize that I and other writers are not writing about this to brag, to be arrogant, or to be blowhard sellouts. We are writing these stories because we genuinely think they bring value to our readers. That’s all anyone here is trying to do.