Good morning Reader, A few weeks ago, I was at the Taylor Swift concert in Munich. One of my friends Sinem was in the area so we met up for coffee! Despite being friends since 2020, we’ve only met in person twice — once at my wedding, and then this past July in Germany. Zulie and Sinem Günel in Germany! Image by author She’s such a successful creator, really the whole package. She has a thriving business: she works on projects she believes in, she gets to write as much as she likes, and she...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Good morning Reader, It is an uncomfortable truth that nobody really likes to acknowledge: to get better at writing, you should probably get better at taking feedback about your writing. (Sorry to Jane Austen for butchering her famous line.) I used to be terrible at dealing with comments from editors on my writing. I hated them! I feared them! I distrusted them! But you know what? To become a professional writer of any kind, you have to learn how to work with other people on that most...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Good morning Reader, Some exciting personal news: I've just been hired by Medium to be a product marketer! In short, I'll be doing a lot of what I have been doing - helping writers use Medium to write awesome stories - but now while wearing my sweet new Medium jumper. Here's the full story: Write Like Your Dream Employer Is Watching (or How I Got Hired by Medium) What does this mean for you? My focus will be more on Medium blogging specifically. In the past, I've written about AI tools, other...
5 months ago • 1 min read
Good morning Reader, Fun fact: my most-ever successful article started as a newsletter I wrote in about an hour. Seriously. Here's the story -- and if you were here a year ago, you might remember it! Around this time last year, I was getting fed up and annoyed with this one piece of advice I was seeing repeated everywhere: "You need to be on [insert platform]!" Insert platform was sometimes LinkedIn, sometimes TikTok, sometimes a newer platform like Threads. So I opened up my newsletter...
6 months ago • 5 min read
Good morning Reader, Quick reminder if you don't recognizemy name in your inbox: 👋 I'm Zulie. I'm a writer on Medium, my favorite blogging platform, and on my website, ZulieWrites.com I make content (videos, articles, and newsletters) about how to grow your blogging empire and make a living writing about what you love Today's newsletter is, somewhat ironically, about consistent writing. Here's a fun stat for you: in 2021, I wrote 121 articles on Medium. In 2022, I wrote just 72. In 2023, I...
6 months ago • 5 min read
Good afternoon Reader, Medium has recently introduced a new and kind of wild option: instead of paying $5/month for membership, you can choose -- voluntarily! -- to pay $15/month. Quick reminder: Medium is a free blogging platform. Anyone can join and start writing immediately, for free. To join the Partner Program and get paid for your writing, you have to be a paying Medium member. As a Member, you also get to read unlimited paywalled Medium stories. You can read the full blog post here: ✨...
10 months ago • 5 min read
Good afternoon Reader, If you’re like me, you hate looking at your old blog posts. It’s like hearing stories about what you did when you were drunk — I really said those things? I really wrote those words? That’s the odd thing about writing. Unlike other practiced skills like weightlifting, it’s hard to see obvious improvement day-to-day--or even month-to-month. If you want to see how you’ve improved, you have to look at your previous work. Once you can bring yourself to look at your past...
12 months ago • 3 min read
Good afternoon Reader, Here's a dose of tough love. So you want to make a living by writing about what you love. That’s amazing! If more people did that, we’d live in a happier, more passion-filled world. But maybe you’re running into problems. You’re pouring all your passion into your work, which is great, but don’t you also deserve to be rewarded for your hard work? Your blog posts aren’t getting views, you’re getting no comments, no engagement, nothing. Your hard-crafted work sits in a...
12 months ago • 4 min read
Good afternoon Reader, Here's a dose of tough love. So you want to make a living by writing about what you love. That’s amazing! If more people did that, we’d live in a happier, more passion-filled world. But maybe you’re running into problems. You’re pouring all your passion into your work, which is great, but don’t you also deserve to be rewarded for your hard work? Your blog posts aren’t getting views, you’re getting no comments, no engagement, nothing. Your hard-crafted work sits in a...
12 months ago • 5 min read