Ask HN: Looking for advice – how to persuade writers to publish on my platform?

Hey, everyone! I'm working on a startup fictionhub.io, it is a fiction publishing platform, sort of like Medium but for fiction. I've made a lot of progress lately - the website is pretty solid and almost complete, the traffic and twitter following are growing slowly but steadily.

Now my biggest challenge is to attract good writers to the platform, and I'm looking for advice on how to do that. My idea is that Fiction Hub would give writers exposure to the audience, because it is way easier to get discovered when publishing on a community platform instead of the personal blog. I tweet every published story and send the best ones to our subscribers in the weekly digest. People can subscribe to writers, and that way they can grow their audience. In the future I want to make it possible for writers to sell their stories.

But attracting new writers to kickstart the community is still pretty hard. I've had some success with simply cold emailing people and asking them if they want to contribute, but now I'm looking for a more scalable way.

What would you do in my place? Do you have any advice?

Also, does anybody know how Medium got their first contributors?