My First Story Read by 1,000 People on Medium

It was a story worth reading.

4 min readJul 17, 2021

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It was an exciting moment for me to see my story “How to Feel Better” get so many people reading it. It might be routine for many Medium writers but this was the first time for me. Most of my stories get far fewer reads, so I thought I’d dig into why this one did so well.

Picked for further distribution?

Yes, the story was “picked for further distribution,” so are many of my other stories. I looked and that didn’t seem to be the reason. When it was distributed, it only gained a dozen or so views. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that the big spike in readers happened.

I’m excited about each time a story I write is “picked for further distribution.” It means that an editor somewhere liked what I wrote. It is validation that all the work I put into writing the story was worth it. Sometimes it gives my stories a noticeable boost, but for some reason this time it didn’t.

Was it the publication?

I believe there are a lot of Medium writers out there that think they have to get into a big publication. They think that is the answer to get a lot of views and reads. There might be some truth to that theory. I’ve had a few stories published in some of the…

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Leslie Pardew

I am an artist, designer, author, and entrepreneur who has a few things to share about life, art and business.