Writing Tips
I Don’t think Medium and Substack Can or Should be Interchangeable
When I launched Rosy’s Ramblings almost a year ago, I started by researching which platform I would use and for me, Substack came out on top. One year on, here’s what I think.
My first few wobbly steps
As with any new writer branching out, my first few steps were as wobbly as a newborn foal, but I stuck with it. I am a dinosaur when it comes to anything technical and I can clearly remember feeling so overwhelmed that I almost collapsed in a heap, just like that wobbly young foal. But I am made of sterner stuff and I heaved myself up and wobbled through.
Learning to navigate your way around any new platform is never easy for people like me but, as with most things in life, a little perseverance and a lot of patience pay off.
Going live
On April 28th, 2021 my first ever post went live: Village Life in England. As you can see, at the bottom of the post I stated that the article was adapted and had first been published on Medium in January 2021. Great. That was easy. Or so I thought.
From what I had read, it seemed that all I had to do as a writer on Medium, which I joined, incidentally, the month I wrote that article in January 2021, was to tweak the title, make sure I mentioned it had been published on Medium (I have since learned that Google doesn’t like duplicate articles and might flag them as being plagiarised), and everything would be tickety-boo. Wrong.
What do readers want?
The truth is that readers want fresh content. What if you picked up a newspaper, let’s say, The Times, and read a great article about a holiday destination in Greece. Then you read the exact same article in another newspaper. Wouldn’t you feel cheated? I know I would.
Also, every writer spins their own view or take on a subject and some can make a dull destination sound vibrant and interesting, while others will say it as it is. Journalists, essayists, writers, authors — we all have our unique voices or style of writing.
