Daily Success Stories from ILLUMINATION
Best of Bests Are Emerging
1816 ILLUMINATION writers are illuminating 16,366 readers!
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.―Aristotle
I proposed a new writing challenge on my bulletin the day before. 24 writers have already taken the challenge and submitted their fabulous stories. I compiled them in an article for easy access and started distributing to our readers. Here is what we collected so far. I would appreciate your brief comments on this story so that your names are recognized, and our readers discover your accounts.
Extending our writing challenge
I want to propose another challange extending the current activity.
Now that we have the best of best stories as assessed by the writers, as part of our cross-pollination goals, I want to propose each writer to choose one or more writers and review their stories from their selected stories.
What does this activity require?
You need to review each story in a bundle. Leave a comment, tweet the story and write a brief note about what you learnt from each story. You share your views of the reviewed stories in your story titled “Review of Stories [Insert Name]”.
Why do I recommend this activity?
There are five reasons for recommending this activity. Our publication was established based on cross-pollination, reciprocity, diversity, collaboration, synergy, and serendipity principles. Here are my ideas:
1. You have a new powerful story opportunity to feature someone’s work.
2. You get a chance of reviewing several articles from a single writer and gain a deeper understanding of this specific writer.
3. You build a stronger relationship with the writer and turn that writer to your fan.
4. You learn new writing styles, discover new topics, and broaden your knowledge.
5. This activity can undoubtedly create serendipity.
Look forward to your review stories to create synergy among our writers, inform our readers, and give excellent reading experience to our readers with more options. By undertaking this activity, we can add value to our customers.
We need to generate more traffic each day!
To increase views and reads for our stories, we must generate more traffic to our publication each day. Generating traffic to our stories is the responsibility of all writers. The low hanging fruit is using Twitter smartly. Medium made Twitter use by automating it for us. All we need to do is to link our Twitter handle to our Medium account and click on the Twitter icon each time when we read a story. I am emphasize this point as it is important for our success.
Based on my reviews, unfortunately, only 20% of the writers seem to link their Twitter handle to their Medium accounts. I want to help the remaining 80% by creating simple steps in a story. Please see the attached story providing step by step guidance on how to accomplish this goal. It is easy and straightforward!
I recommend every writer to have a Twitter account and link it to Medium account. And more importantly, please make it a habit to click on the Twitter icon for each story you read. This simple activity can have enormous potential to create serendipity. Content platforms need the traffic to survive and thrive.
What did ILLUMINATION writers create today?
Here is a bundle of stories I was able to add to our distribution list today. Thank you for adding comments to create visibility to your great stories.
One of the purpose of this daily distribution is easy access to our stories. I recommend to enjoy as many stories as possible from this list. If your story is not included, please leave a comment by linking your story. As publication team we do our best but it must be a collective effort. To this end, it will be excellent for each writer to take responsibility to create visibility for his or her own story. We grow with support, synergy, and collaboration.
Let’s check our publication page for more stories.
Many more stories can be found from our publication page.
I am pleased that the Medium Blogging Guide featured ILLUMINATION in their top 10 fiction hosting publications. You can review story from the attached link and leave a brief comment about your experience on ILLUMINATION if you are a fiction writer. Our readers love fiction.
New writers who joined ILLUMINATION today
20 new writers joined our publication today. We have 1816 writers supporting ILLUMINATION now. A warm welcome to our new writers: Alloyce Lugoma, Isaiah McCall, Sahar Sharjeal, Andrew Poletto, Smruti Hingnikar, Sri Harsha, Ali, Ms. Rai, Rebecca Stevens, TheSkepticalStatistician, Peggy Nazer, Ilya Frid, MS, Jeremy Sam, Rochelle Newman, Nick Baldomar, Taha Rasool, Steve Hutchins, Sakshi Kharbanda, Bo Stapler, MD, EricSutherland
IMPORTANT NOTE TO NEW WRITERS: To ensure your stories are published on a timely basis, please provide required credits to the photos and extracted information from other sources. This is the most common issue delaying some stories to be published. If you turn off your private messages we have no other mechanism to reach out to you. If your article is not published within 48 hours please contact me from this link.
I received several inquiries from new writers who want to know how to add stories to publication. Please see the attached story providing step by step guidance by our editor Timothy Key.
ILLUMINATION Slack Channel
We created a writer collaboration platform using Slack. We have 385+ members. I added several writers to our Slack channel today. Thank you for the inquires and willingness to join our collaboration and innovation lab. New writers are invited to join our Slack to have a chat and collaborate with other inspiring writers. We discuss editorial matters, Medium policies, content quality, and overall writing skills improvement. You can request an invitation to Slack from this link. Please type Request for Slack on the heading as I have many other requests from this link.
You can check this story from Timothy Key to learn how to use Slack if you haven’t used it before.
Please also check our process and procedures for further details on our publication.
Featured Writer Bios Today
Upon request, we start featuring three writer bio stories each day.
Sylvia Love Johnson
Tom Byers
Chris Hedges
200+ writers introduced themselves in their stories so far. This is an opportunity for our writers to showcase their writing portfolio. I recommend all new writers to introduce themselves in an article. We compile these introductions, keep this resource on the first page of our publication and also share the file with our 16,000+ readers. Please see the attached bio document as an example for creating your bios. Our readers are interested in our writers. If your bio is missing from this list, please leave a comment with your your story link.
Featured Interview Stories on Publication Page
We will be featuring three writer interview story each day. Today, we featured inspiring interviews that I conducted with:
Jill Ebstein
Ming Qian
Holly Jahangiri
I have been interviewing our writers to feature their profile and great stories. I added a few more interview stories today. You can read the interviews from the attached story. If you are a writer on ILLUMINATION and would like to be interviewed, please send a request via this link with title of “Interview Request”.
Featured Stories Today
We featured 12 stories from our creative writers today. These stories will be placed on the front page for 24 hours for easy access.
Tina L. Smith
Pepper Lowe
Mukundarajan V N
Dr Michael Heng
Danielle Tantone
Robert Nelson
conny manero
Woei T
Claire Elaine
Harun Reşit Aydin
Marcus Musick
Lisa Gastaldo
Stories Distributed from ILLUMINATION to Medium Topics
Seven great stories were distributed to multiple Medium topics today. Each story is unique and well crafted. I felt privileged to have early access to these great stories on our publication. Each day audience from new topics come across ILLUMINATION represented by its creative writers.
A story by Sharon Hurley Hall was distribute to #travel #race #equality.
A story by Dakota Duncan was distributed to #self.
A story by Patrícia S. Williams was distributed to #self #mindfulness.
A story by Rosennab was distributed to #race #equality.
A story by Michelle Marie Warner was distributed to #self #mental health.
A story by Ryan Frawley was distributed to #creativity #writing.
A story by Taylor O'Connor was distributed to #self #relationship.
As ILLUMINATION hosts an impressive number of high-quality stories distributed to the topics from our creative writers, I compiled those stories. I aim to create awareness for the high-quality stories so that our new writers can leverage these excellent stories, model the styles so that they can improve their stories for increasing chance of curation by Medium curators. You can find the complete list from the attached story. I update it regularly.
Content Quality Focus
Our current writers know that we strive for excellence. We aim to increase the quality of your stories and provide an enjoyable reading experience to our followers. Quality is an iterative process. I notice that the quality of our stories is increasing day by day. The curation rate increased.
New writers: please ensure that you check your stories for typos, spelling, and grammar errors before submitting them to the publication. Our readers deserve high quality stories.
We have some volunteering editors who can perform a proof-reading for the writers from the non-English speaking background. You can search for volunteers from our Slack channel. One of the proof-reading tools our writers recommend is Grammarly.
ILLUMINATION Social Media Links
We share our stories in the following platforms. We encourage our new writers to join and follow these links.
Twitter — Facebook — LinkedIn — Flipboard- YouTube- Pinterest
You can also check our syndicated content: Blogs, PublisherSpotlight.
Invitation to writers who may be interested in ILLUMINATION
If you want to join our growing and supportive publication as a writer, please leave a message via this link. We curate valuable content for our readers; we create awareness and visibility of our content to wider audience. We also amplify Medium articles on social media to bring new readers and subscribers.
If you have already applied from different means and not added to the publication yet, please try again by directly writing to me. Some messages are easily lost on articles.
Several new top writers joined us. We have now 1750+ writers. The more the better for our diversity. We aim to appeal to millions providing diverse and insightful content globally.
Please see an article by Timothy Key on writer invitation.
