A Writer’s Life

I Earned $11 Yesterday and Didn’t Publish a Story. Here’s Why.

Plus—A Medium Top Writer’s 3 Tips to Boost Your Earnings

Alex Bentley
3 min readFeb 15, 2022

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Photo by Olya Kobruseva from Pexels

Yesterday, I celebrated Valentine’s Day with my wife.

So I took the day off from writing.

And what I realized is that taking a break from writing is okay. We all need a break sometimes, don’t we?

Since last November, I’ve been writing and publishing at least one new story a day. Sometimes 2–3 stories if I’m having a rockstar day.

Another thing I realized is that once you build up a decent following on this platform and write enough stories, you can still earn passive income.

With 222 stories published on Medium, I’ve finally built up a library of content that earns while I sleep or even take days off.

I’m averaging about $8–12 per day from the Medium Partner Program. I even had one day where I nearly made $20 in a single day.

For the month of February, I’m on track to hit $300 in partner earnings.

But even with these realizations, I know I can’t take too many days off from my writing schedule. At least not yet.

As I experimented last year, I didn’t write for a month and all my story views and read counts tanked.

You can read about my experiment and the lessons I learned here:

Which means I can’t stop writing entirely.

I must keep a schedule and stick to it.

It’s not all about the money, though. Because I love to write.

With every new story I publish, I learn something new about myself, my audience and this platform.

If you’re a new writer on Medium or aspire to be one of the platform’s top writers, then here are a few things I think we both need to do.

Write Consistently

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Alex Bentley

I write about crypto, personal finance, business & tech. Also, I publish a bit of humor to make you laugh.