The results of my unintentional experiment.

You may have noticed that I took a bit of a break from writing here on Medium for the past several months.

Okay — it was eight months. The better part of a year.

I know most people probably didn’t even notice. I’m not fooling myself into thinking I’m the most popular writer on Medium, or even a popular writer on Medium, if I’m being honest. But I know I always wondered what it would mean for my stats and for my writing here if I took a break.

And I missed it. I missed writing here and, yes, I missed you reading this!

So I’m going to share here what happened. I’m going to be brutally honest because I’m sure there are other writers here who have wondered the same things.

So why did I take a break in the first place?

Well, it wasn’t intentional. In May of last year, I got a new full-time job. A full-time job that was a lot busier than my previous job, and that actually included writing as a major part of the job description. I was excited about the job and about the new things I could learn working for an incredible new organization, so I decided to truly put my best foot forward and do away with at least some of the distractions that would keep me from bringing my best.

That included slowing down my writing on Medium. I initially only intended to take a month or two away from this platform as I adjusted to my new full-time role, but that quickly became multiple months, and before I knew it the holidays were approaching and I hadn’t even opened Medium to write down an article headline, let alone write an article.

During this time I also plunged head-first into writing my romance novel. You may remember me mentioning that I submitted to a Harlequin contest, and made it to round two. I was ecstatic to move through to the next round, but that meant I needed to do the hard part of actually writing and editing my book. It was due at the end of summer 2022, so when I wasn’t working my day job, I was spending my time writing my book. I received a revise and resubmit last fall after I finally submitted that book (more on that to come — don’t worry), but after writing furiously for several months to finish the book, I took a bit of a break from writing altogether. I wanted to make sure I could come back to my manuscript with fresh eyes and fresh ideas when the time was right.

How did my break from Medium affect my platform here?

Like I said previously, I know I’m not a big popular writer here by any means. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t making a bit of side income and building a community of other writers here, though!

When I first took my break, I was worried that the stats I was starting to see every month would dip significantly. I’m happy to report that my stats didn’t change very much at all. For the past eight months, I’ve continued to have readers stumble upon my stories, and while there has always been an ebb and flow to the number of readers, the average has stayed about the same.

While the number of readers on my stories wasn’t affected by my absence, I did see a dip in my earnings every month. I’ve never been a particularly high earner on Medium. I was happy to earn some change for a coffee run while I wrote or enough money to go out to dinner with friends, but I was by no means making my living off of my earnings here. During those eight months I was gone from this platform, I initially didn’t see a change in my earnings. But after month four or five I started to earn about a third of what I typically was earning per month.

I suspect that the correlation, or lack thereof, really, between my reader stats and my earnings is due to one thing in particular: I have several stories that bring in a lot of traffic from outside search engines, but not from Medium readers. One of my stories (Should You Use a Pen Name?) frequently comes up on the first page of Google search results when looking for information about pen names, and I have a few other stories that have been linked in Reddit threads about saving money and come up under commonly searched terms.

What’s going to happen now?

I’m back, baby! I’m planning to publish more on Medium in 2023, and we’ll see where this takes me. So far I’ve written a few stories that will be published in the coming weeks, and we’ll see how those stories perform. It may take some time for my stories to be shared through the algorithm as much as they were before, or my numbers may go back to normal quickly. It’s a bit hard to tell at this point, but I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

Regardless of what happened to my stats, or what will happen now that I’m back to writing on Medium, I’ve learned that sometimes it’s necessary to take a break. I’m excited to be back, but I know that I needed the break to focus on other projects, bring back some creativity, and figure out what I wanted to do with my writing platform — here on Medium and elsewhere.

Taking a break isn’t always intentional, but it’s usually needed, and I’m hoping it means that I can come back stronger. Only time will tell.

Previously published in Boosting and Writing Matters