4 Ways of the Wordsmith: How to Be Happy and Successful Now
Since we will never know the inner workings of the curation system, it leaves only one choice — figure out how to write better.

For the last two weeks, I’ve made a sincere effort to read articles on how to become a better writer.

While most of the posts were filled with generalities, hollow inspirational talk, a few quotes from famous writers — and the ever present whisper to subscribe here, or enroll in this class here, or join an online seminar here — I did find something of substance.

Here’s a real-world experiment which is so cool I’m going to interrupt my smart phone-friendly writing style. This is the first week of that series, written by an established professional writer who opens a secret account and starts out like as an unknown, new writer on Medium:

As I followed the weekly progress, I was shocked by the matter-of-fact tone of the list of things she did, that included the bullet point, “I wrote seven posts (four of them were curated).”

In the third week, she wrote, “I wrote seven posts. (Six of them were curated!).”

At least she seemed excited about this impossibly high percentage rate of curated articles.

I had to make a comment with some skepticism. She was gracious enough to respond, so we had a brief conversation where she told me that her normal curation rate is 70–80%.

OMG, Jesus walked on water, and he only got curated 41.6% of the time! FYI, it was Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul (with Ringo supplying an awesome syncopated back beat).

Here’s why I found her one of the few voices in the Medium’s online coaching world that I don’t dismiss as being just another shyster content marketer:

She takes the perspective of diving into process to break down why things work, instead of simply quoting someone famous and then babbling on in generalities. I just clicked randomly on one day in her 30-day writing challenge and found this explanation of reading like a writer to figure out why things work. It’s something I’ve done for years, but I haven’t seen any other writing expert talk about this perspective. Do a search for “reading intensely” and you’ll see. Just don’t go down to the bottom of the search page. She has creates her own publications and doesn’t try to glom onto those Medium publications to build her readership. Because of that, she doesn’t have one of those “best story picked by our editors.” She’s getting her stories curated the old fashioned way: “she earns it.” She doesn’t give away all the secret sauce for free, but she provides a closer look at the real process of becoming successful on Medium than anyone else I’ve found. Check out her experiment: “I blogged every day for a month. Here’s what happened.” It contained some real gems, including a link to the #1 Free Headline Analyzer. This is absolutely crazy. It’s not a perfect tool, but it is thought provoking and proved to be a lot of fun.

Since she is not getting her stories accepted by Medium publications each week, she has to be doing something right.
['Lon Shapiro']
['Technology', 'Humor', 'Writing', 'Social Media', 'Médium']