Medium or my own domain

It doesn’t seem like that long, but it’s nearly nine months since I wrote that, while I still love Medium, I’d probably post more of my writing on my own (then new) site for a while, at least until I’d established some kind of web presence for it. And that’s how it has worked out, more or less. In the months since then, I’ve posted just 11 pieces here on Medium, some of them quite insubstantial. This has coincided with Medium’s more assertive approach to the paywall and to curation of posts. Partly because of these factors, those more recent posts of mine haven’t been seen by as many readers as I was used to. Two pieces in particular, “What Colm Tóibín said about genre fiction” and an account of rereading Kate Atkinson’s first novel many years later, have had only a small number of views from within Medium itself but seem to be starting to enjoy a bit of an afterlife in Google and other search results.

It seems that even if the curators don’t select your post for distribution, there’s likely to be an advantage in terms of search engine visibility to posting here.

Here are some of the things I’ve been posting on my own site in the meantime.

Criticism and book discussion

“Andrew Marvell’s Gender”: This is the approved draft of a piece I published in the journal Essays in Criticism in 2016.

“Liz Nugent, Skin Deep: A woman to blame”: A discussion of Liz Nugent’s third novel (which I’ve recently decided, somewhat to my surprise, that I’m probably never going to read again, something which is not at all true of her second novel, Lying in Wait).

“Robert Galbraith, Lethal White”: The long delayed update to my Medium post from eighteen months ago, “Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike books”.

General posts

“Preparing to close my Amazon account”: Towards the end of last year, I noticed I hadn’t ordered anything from Amazon since November 2017. Without quite noticing, I’d drifted into a boycott. The next step was to close my account. Having done that, I’ve now deleted my Goodreads profile too.

“How ebooks could become real books”: A follow-up to something I posted here on Medium.

“More thoughts about ebooks and real books”: I seem to have had a bee in my bonnet about ebooks.

“Pinterest ‘breaks’ the grid”: Again, further thoughts about something I’d previously posted here on Medium: “What, if anything, is Pinterest good for?”

“Survivorship bias in writing and publishing”: I recently rediscovered a 72-page essay from 2005 by Michael Allen, titled On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, so I reread it. And found that my views had changed somewhat.

Fiction

I haven’t written any new fiction since starting my own site, but there I have put up a page on that site listing my short stories, novella and novel. It’s clear that (on average) fiction doesn’t get nearly as many readers on Medium as certain types of nonfiction does. With that in mind, I was thinking about moving all my fiction from Medium onto my own site, as there seemed to be no particular advantage in leaving it here. But when I checked the statistics, I found that my short stories and other fiction have been getting a trickle of page views: typically 2 to 4 views each in the previous 30 days. That’s not a lot but it’s probably more than they’d attract on an obscure personal website, so those stories will remain on Medium.

I hope you find something here that you’ll enjoy reading.