I generally ignore any Medium advice story that begins with “You should…” or “You shouldn’t…” We are all individuals and we all have different wants and needs. Blanket advice is presumptuous at best (unless it’s “You shouldn’t murder people for fun.” I am pretty sure that applies to everyone.)

If you are trying to make writing a career, publishing every day may be a good goal. If you write for pleasure or some other reason, publishing daily is not essential. Putting pressure on yourself to do something daily can take the joy out it and make it seem like a job.

I can publish daily because I always have dozens of very short humor stories ready to go. And I have many other longer stories in progress. This gives me a buffer and allows me to take my time on new stories and work on the ones that interest me a the moment.

But I don’t feel a need to publish daily. In fact, I find if I skip a day, my most recent story continues to get reads the day I don’t publish. When I publish daily, yesterday’s stories rarely get read. When I publish more than once a day, each story gets less reads.

I don’t think there is a magic formula for everyone. It depends on what you write, why you write, the quality of your writing, who follows you, and who you are as an individual.

These are my opinions and observations. They will certainly not apply to everyone.

Bonus Rant:

I saw a story today by a “sucessful Medium writer” that said you should publish at least three times a day to succeed on Medium. Really? How many people can write three quality stories per day? Even if you can, should you publish them all in one day? Frankly, I can’t keep up reading the writers I follow now. And most don’t publish every day.

With a few exceptions, if a writer publishes three stories per day, it pretty much guarantees I won’t read two of them. And if their story quality drops and they start repeating themselves frequently, I will likely lose interest.