This past year, Medium has given readers and writers more control over the stories they see by emphasizing follows over algorithms. Now, writers, you can take your follower list one step further. Let your fans know when you’ve published something new from their email inbox, in addition to when they come to Medium, by adding the option to subscribe to story updates. You control which stories get sent and your subscriber list is portable.

We made the tool simple, here’s how to use it.

First, go to your Settings page and find a new Followers section. You’ll see the option…

Write something valuable. A common strategy for this is to share your own life lessons. There’s plenty of advice around. In books, online, and on Medium, you can find tips on everything. It’s a pretty generous collective gesture. Still, even with good intentions, not all stories will land well. What makes one article more compelling than another?

Jean-Luc Bouchard, platform editor at Marker, shares insights recently given to a contributing writer. Marker helps their readers make better business decisions. Presenting lessons in a compelling, original way is crucial.

Be concise, give actionable and practical advice, and have a clear audience…

In 2017, we launched the Medium Partner Program to fairly compensate writers for their quality stories, with unlimited potential to earn. Since then, we’ve paid more than $6 million to over 30,000 writers, increasing payouts year over year.

Today, we’re excited to announce an updated earnings model to improve how writers earn for their stories through the Partner Program.

Instead of paying based on claps as the main signal, we will now reward stories primarily based on reading time, which we’ve seen to be a closer measure of quality and resonance with readers. …

Every day the curation team reviews stories for distribution through Medium’s topics. Curators are looking for great stories to distribute, but in addition to quality, stories must meet some minimum guidelines. (Read the full curation guidelines here.) Some of the issues that disqualify a story from curation can easily be fixed. So before you hit publish, check to see if you’ve met these commonly missed guidelines.

Note that you can still publish on Medium without meeting these guidelines (except for rules violations), but you will not be eligible for curation.

1. Write quality headlines

We could fill a whole post with headline best practices…

Writers come in many forms.

Shaunta Grimes has been one for a long time. She has a Master’s in writing fiction, is a published author, and runs the Every Day Novelist publication on Medium. Her third novel, The Astonishing Maybe, was published by Penguin Random House in March.

There is also Shannon Ashley, who began writing independently only a year ago, when she quickly went from writing social media posts for companies to publishing popular stories on Medium about the topics that interest her: sex, family, and mental health.

Both women work full time as writers and support their families…

Today, we’re making two improvements to the Medium Partner Program that have been among the most-requested features since we launched the program in 2017. Both changes are designed to reduce trade-offs for writers: Writers no longer have to choose between earning money and submitting their story to a publication, and writers no longer have to worry about their fans not being able to read their work because of our metered paywall.

Partner Program stories can now appear in publications

First, we’ve removed the limitation that writers could not add Partner Program stories to publications on Medium. …

TThe impact of technology is something that concerns us all, whether or not we have kids.

From infants and toddlers to teenagers and young adults, new generations are being exposed to emerging technologies, apps, and devices, and they’re having an effect that we are only beginning to comprehend.

What we do know is this: The decisions tech companies make about their products — and the way parents police their kids’ interaction with their digital selves — can have a lasting impact on the well-being of generations ahead.

We’ve curated a set of four powerful essays that raise important questions about…

On April 3, Medium launched an anthology edited by the bestselling author Roxane Gay. The collection is at times intimate and brave, with 24 of Gay’s favorite writers responding to the same prompt: “What does it mean to live in an unruly body?”

I spoke with Gay and a handful of the contributors for Unruly Bodies, including Carmen Maria Machado, Kiese Laymon, and Randa Jarrar, about their essays and the project.

The Medium collection, says Gay, builds off her 2017 memoir Hunger, a blazingly honest account of her life so far, told through the history of her body. In Hunger…