Ask HN: Where do you write? I would like to write some short stories but I don't know where to publish them. Should I go for Medium, or a personal blog ... Whatever you are writing, fictional or not, which platform do you use to publish ? And what are the pros and cons ? |
Write on Medium and Your Blog
Write on Substack. <=== I do. Pros: I can get paid. Cons: Formatting is simple.
Write on Amazon Publishing
Started about 7 years ago and still haven't stopped. I did try a few times, but people keep emailing me.
Its easy way to write and publish content.
Just checkout git repo, write posts with your favourite editor and push changes to github - thats all.
Previously, I've being using Wordpress and Ghost. Both were real nigtmare to manage.
What was nightmarish about Ghost and when did you last use it?
Their value proposition is 1. they will keep the servers online for all time 2. low bullshit post hosting
I use Hugo because it's simple yet flexible, powerful and produces a static bundle that is easily hostable anywhere. I use the `hello-friend` theme with significant tweaks, mostly a lot of shortcodes for better and more-responsive friendly image handling. I wanted a markdown based flow with minimal JS that didn't require node/rails/etc toolchains. Hugo is available both as a docker image and a small compiled binary so both local builds and CI builds are very easy. Currently I'm hosted via Gitlab for ease (I can use my own CI runner and the hosting itself is free with SSL support) but I've used S3 and others with great results.
I do my drafting in my favorite notes app InkDrop, and then just take my markdown file and drop it into my repo. One git push and it's published. Still haven't found a great platform to let non-technical folks edit my posts though.
I keep my images and big files in a Digital Ocean CDN. I use rclone to manage cdn contents (it uses the s3 protocol) and have some utility scripts to pull the cdn locally and then sync up changes. I ended up having to write a small golang program to easily bulk resize images at responsive breakpoints: https://gitlab.com/vorpalhex/responsimg
For me, this setup makes it very low friction to compose blog posts and get them published and it gets good lighthouse speed scores and loads quickly on even low end devices with bad connections. No medium paywall, no facebook SDK, etc. I did end up caving and installing Google Analytics (I was very displeased with piwik).
Do you wish to advance painfully and quickly? Then find a traditional (online or paper) publisher and submit submit submit until you write something someone likes.
For my personal website, I use Jekyll on Vercel (ex. Zeit). I only did it because I wanted to code a bit and own the domain and the content.
1. It's pretty quick to start
2. It's free but you can upgrade to premium for advanced features
3. Also Medium's community is a huge advantage
I don't remember the exact number, but the vast majority of my Medium readers (something like 80% IIRC) came from HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc. My most read article had about 170k reads before I removed my content from Medium.
* Edit: That doesn't mean you shouldn't! :-) However, you might get more readership - if that's what you're interested in - by writing pretty much anywhere, and just sharing it with the right communities.
Just clone an example repo and push a commit, it should generate your site.
You can still add a custom domain in gitlab project settings.
I really wonder how it could be easier (fork a repo, push a commit) or cheaper (given that it's free).
I've found in this age of online sharing my motivations and enjoyments of things is more pure if I just do it for myself, and maybe share with one or two appreciative people.
In addition, I find that not telling anyone your goals or ambitions is extremely underrated. There's research that shows that if you do that, you get some of the reward for having done something worthwhile without nearly as much of the work, so the actual work becomes harder to do. And personally, I find it's absolutely true. The rest of the world's noise and opinions interferes with my own developmental process.
If I do things for myself and only for myself, it usually goes so much better.
I think it's ego satisfaction or something? I personally have started to tell myself "get it done/build it first before you share it". Like buying a domain before the site/app is ready.
In my personal case I find markdown very useful when I absolutely need some formatting but don't want to waste time with HTML, toolbar buttons or having to remember keyboard shortcuts. The great thing about it is that it doesn't break the flow, I can just keep writing.
For publishing (which I do rarely as I mostly write just for my own amusement) I use Neocities because it's just old school HTML and doesn't get in my way, GitHub pages work for that too. The good thing about those two is that backups are basically hassle free, you always have a local and a remote copy and don't have to worry about having to backup a database or export a blog (as is the case for Medium or WordPress). Since you asked for cons too: static site generators and GitHub commands not only are something else you have to install, learn and keep up-to-date, they also break the flow so only use them once you've finished writing.
So here's my summary: choose whatever platform you feel that doesn't get in the way of your writing.
I am all-in on Notion these days, though, and wish I could use it for my blog. I could but I want nicer URLs and to have it be on my domain.
I've written a bunch of short stories over the years. Some I've trunked after they didn't go anywhere. In a couple of instances, I've published them on my newsletter (andrewliptak.substack.com), and then republished them at Curious Fictions.
But the short answer is: wherever is easiest. I find setting up a wordpress.com blog (free) easiest, but medium or dev.to are good as well.
Don't let your desire to find the perfect platform inhibit your writing. The hard part about writing is the writing, not the platform. As a developer, I find it easy to get tangled up in tech choices, package upgrades and deployment pipelines, which lets me avoid or defer actually writing.
This is why the vast majority of my writing is on paper, never to be published. The act of writing helps me order my thoughts, and that’s much easier to do if I can be confident they’re only for me.
I will say there's sometimes additional clarification that occurs if I'm going to publish something (internally or to the world). I find that makes me aim for that extra bit of polish or certitude.
Thy said, the platform doesn’t matter. No one will find your content unless you cultivate an audience. There’s not much difference between Medium and GitHub and pastebin as far as your audience is concerned. If you want readers you’ll need an outlet that has them already (existing magazine, for example) or you’ll have to learn about marketing and promotion.
Good luck. Keep writing! The world needs your stories.
Wattpad has been popular for those who can keep up with the social requirements (frequent updates, networking, etc.)
Same thing with the SEO. Why give the SEO juice to Medium instead of your own personal domain?
Building a static site with e.g. Hugo or Jekyll is an appealing choice. If you want you can use Cloudfront + S3 to host it.
OTOH, Wordpress is very convenient to work with and quick to set up. If you don’t have a VPS there are shared web hosting sites that should be good enough in the beginning at least. Shared web hosting can also be used for static sites.
Pros:
- Cheap.
- Static and small. Hugo lets me really make everything tiny.
- Learned more about AWS.
- A lot of work because I had to setup Route 53, CloudFront, Certificate Manager and S3.
- Learning about the permission model and setting up an IAM user with right permissions.
- Figuring out how Route 53, Certificate Manager and CloudFront work together so I could have SSL.
Granted, it doesn't get much traffic except for 2 post that gets me 5-10 visitors daily. https://ianmf.com
Based on painful firsthand experience, don't waste much time optimizing for the 'best' way to share. Just create, share, adjust. You can always switch to another 'tool'--tools are cheap, plentiful, and don't matter much. You'll kill every ounce of creativity and momentum mucking around in the weeds looking for the best 'tools'.
I attempted to use Gatsby for a personal blog/knowledge base-style setup and was immediately turned off by the seemingly immense overhead involved (React, CSS-in-JS, GraphQL).
I ended up with Vuepress instead and I'm happy (so far, anyway); a big draw is that it doesn't really require any Vue knowledge to get up and running.
I intend to write more technical content, and I don’t think ghost is that great for the purpose. I wish I were writing markdown and generating static assets locally. Having to send highlight.js to every client for syntax highlighting is unnecessary.
I post exclusively on my own Wordpress blog hosted on vultr for $5/month. If you aren’t a developer I’d recommend some self service option.
To build a following perhaps try twitter, Reddit, and medium. There’s also probably locations to post short stories I’m unaware of
Then push content out to Medium, dev.to, Twitter, etc if you're looking for more of an audience.