Celebration

Happy Birthday ILLUMINATION

A Productive Year From All Ends

On 19 March 2020, when lock-down started in my city, I started my invitation post with these words:

“As a reader, I am excited to explore fascinating writers and outstanding content on Medium. The Medium ecosystem is great and could be better with our positive ownership, collaborative and proactive leadership. We can contribute to the transformation of this platform collaboratively and creatively. Our collective aim is to be an innovation catalyst for a transformed content ecosystem.”

Observing rejections and sympathizing with the pain of many creative writers in my first three months on Medium encouraged me to establish a diverse and inclusive writing and reading community using a publication.

Eighty writers immediately jumped onto the bandwagon to create the foundations of this illuminating community. Some names cemented in my aging memories are Karen Madej, Deborah Barchi, Joe Luca, Julia E Hubbel, Paul Myers MBA, Arthur G. Hernandez, Desiree Driesenaar, Bill Abbate, René Junge, Terry Mansfield, Trista Ainsworth, Michele Thill, Tim Maudlin, Martine Weber, R Tsambounieri Talarantas, Selma and many more top writers who shared their inspiring stories.

Let me give you a high-level view of our distinguishing approach to publishing within the last 12 months.

Collaboration is a magical ingredient for success in life. A single person cannot build an airplane or a skyscraper, but many united people can. This analogy reflects how I feel now after bringing 8,800 writers and 88,000 readers to a united, peaceful and illuminating place, which we call ILLUMINATION in 12 months.

I envisioned this publication would be among the top 100, manifested as the top 60 most followed publications on Medium, but did not anticipate its stories would get millions of views in such a short time and create indexed entries in Google bringing substantial traffic to platform.

Witnessing many trending and viral stories gave me the greatest pleasure. I felt honored when many published authors, scholars, top writers, and several superstars of the blogging world joined our community and shared their memorable stories.

Giving voice to thousands of writers and offering over 150,000 stories to readers was an excellent outcome for my goal. Diligent editors helped us realize this goal. In addition, these editors educated our writers and helped them to submit more enjoyable stories. Many writers followed our quality guidelines and delighted our readers.

The best strategy we had was categorizing our writers, cross-pollinating them, and giving them a clear transformation path. We implemented this unique strategy using ILLUMINATION-Curated as a transition tool.

No new venture starts with perfection. Only with a pragmatic approach, with many trials and errors, can we achieve significant results.

Meeting thousands of writers and readers, obtaining their feedback, and understanding their requirements and aspirations taught me valuable lessons in this intensive and joyful journey.

Obtaining insights gained from writers, readers, and constantly adjusting based on feedback became the critical success factor for the eight milestones that we achieved. We diligently measured our milestones and successfully met our goals for the first year.

Like any noble venture, protagonists emerged inevitably out of nowhere. Some reasonable critics, some silly speculations, some severe allegations attempting to sabotage our efforts surrounded us. We lost our lights for one day because of disgusting accusations. We instantly immunized our publication to protect it from those evil attempts.

Most of the allegations were debunked by diligent writers like Alison Tennent in this piece called A Cult of Envy for ILLUMINATION and Marcus in a piece published on another publication. Rather than giving up due to unnecessary pressure, we committed to excellence by improving our process and procedures.

Any successful enterprise can be envied. Instead of using envy as a motivation to succeed, some even went further and threatened writers on Medium, overtly saying that “you could not write for my publication if you write for ILLUMINATION”. This illogical discrimination put many aspiring writers in a very awkward position.

To ease the pain of writers suffering from this discrimination, I gave our contributors complete flexibility, who were not exclusive to us. They have the right to leave my publication anytime with no penalty, come back when they need our service, create their own publications, and remove stories from my publication anytime to grow their own publications. I made my publications as a tool for the success of writers rather than a propriety asset. Primarily, because of this flexibility, 8,800 writers want to contribute to my publications.

Despite giving this flexibility to our contributors, there were still a few who couldn’t stomach our success and kept creating allegations and stupid comments on social media. I tolerated these allegations because they served as a promotion tool for us. The more and worse words they produced, the more contributors and readers we gained.

Dealing with both positive views and criticism in my previous ventures contributed to my professional success; hence, I wanted to replicate this capability for my publications’ success. Rather than refraining from receiving negative feedback, I embrace it for our growth.

In addition to variety and flexibility, our contributors also enjoy sharing their stories with no fear of rejections. Adhering to Medium rules, we only reject content against Medium rules. Our volunteering editors help the contributors improve their presentation and inspire them to create better content.

Our writers participated in our social media platforms, amplifying their stories to external readers by bringing new members to Medium. We created powerful tools on YouTube, LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, Reddit, Good Reads, Flipboard, and Twitter.

The best tool to enhance capabilities of Medium is our virtual workspace for contributing writers. Thousands of contributors collaborate and network with each other on our Slack workspace free of charge.

With the empowering energy of ILLUMINATION, we also created sub-communities. We achieved bringing technology writers in one place, sharing their stories in a new publication called Technology Hits.

We created a new venture bringing writers, bloggers, and freelancers to one place to create synergy and fusion. This new publication is called SYNERGY.

Now on our birthday, we offer a new service called ILLUMINATION Book Chapters owned by ILLUMINATION, aiming to serve all published authors to repurpose their content.

I am delighted by the feedback provided by many discerning readers who commented that ILLUMINATION writers brought fresh perspectives and vitality to Medium. The greatest pleasure for me is noticing many readers made ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated their front page in their reading devices.

Two interesting incidents happened recently; one bad one good. A few days ago our contributors were removed from ILLUMINATION caused by a bug on Medium. It created an impact like the sky was falling down. And the good thing, the number of curated stories dramatically increased.

Thank you Liam Ireland, Terry L. Cooper and Geetika Sethi for starting the celebration earlier than me. Please enjoy Liam’s, Terry’s and Geetika’s story which meant a lot to me.

Thank you for supporting our publications as a contributor and reader. We keep producing, inspiring, supporting, and growing. I will share our next year’s strategy in a different post.

If you want to join ILLUMINATION as a writer, please send a request with your Medium account ID so that we can give you writer access to the publication.