Most of Those Medium Writers Who Claim to Have Made Thousands Writing Books Are Lying

Anyone can say they’re making big bucks, but that doesn’t mean they are.

Rose Bak
5 min readJan 18, 2022

--

Photo by Jingming Pan on Unsplash

I see a lot of articles on Medium with titles like this:

“How I Made Ten Thousand Dollars Publishing Journals on KDP.”

“I Turned My Medium Posts into a Book and Was Shocked at How Quickly I Made Money!”

I myself am an author who sells books online, mostly fiction, so these articles tend to catch my attention, especially since the Medium algorithm seems determined to show me the same damn articles over and over again.

As an author, I’m always trying to get new ideas and learn more about how to grow my publishing income. Every time I read one of these “I cracked the self-publishing code” articles, I feel like a sucker for wasting my time. Why?

Because about 99.9% of the time, I realize that the article is complete bullshit.

Sorry, but it’s true. The vast majority of these writers are NOT making any money, they’re just hoping to make money off of pretending to be an expert.

Last week I read an article where the person allegedly making money was using a program called CreateSpace to publish books on Amazon. Newsflash: CreateSpace was eliminated in 2018 as Amazon moved all of its self-publishing tools into KDP.

Maybe the author was making money — and that’s a big maybe — in 2018 but he sure isn’t now. In fact, he’s clearly not publishing since he doesn’t even know that the tool he was using has been gone for four years now. Yet his article was very authoritative and written as if he’s currently publishing books.

It made me wonder: if this author thinks selling books on Amazon is such a moneymaker, how come he’s published nothing under his name in four years?

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

In another article, an author made some wild claims about how “shocked” they were at how much they made repurposing some of their Medium content into a self-help book. This person, who is one…

--

--

Rose Bak

Rose Bak is a freelance writer and yoga teacher who lives in Oregon. Find her at https://linktr.ee/rosebak or follow @authorrosebak on social media.