This New Inconceivable Medium Statistic Is a Huge Bummer

Over One Thousand Views But They’re Almost All External.

Note to my dear fellow Medium writers: Please do let me know in the comments if you’ve experienced a statistic like this recently, or if you’ve at least clocked this trend. I’m genuinely curious, and misery loves company, etc.

Why the long bag face? Photo by arash payam on Unsplash

Here’s the Context

I’ve fancied myself a writer for most of my adult life, but I’ve taken the craft lot more seriously over the past six years, culminating in my first book—A travel memoir about my first four years solo backpacking across four continents.

I finally self-published at the end of 2020 and focused most of my energy as a writer the following year on promoting the book. I’m rather proud of my memoir, Not That Anyone Asked, and wanted to focus my energy on helping it to find as many new readers' hands as possible.

Towards the end of 2021, I started feeling the itch to regularly write again. I had thrown a couple of articles up on Medium, but I never took my participation in the platform seriously. I saw it as a beautiful home for words.

That changed at the end of 2021 when I wrote a piece that basically went viral overnight. It was a punchy travel blog about eight things that folks…