How I Got Into a Big Publication With My First Draft

I got published in Better Humans on my first attempt with my first Medium draft.

I recently got my first article about improving your sleep published and it was not as hard as I thought it would be. I didn’t spend hours working on my article to make sure it was perfect. Yet, I was confident that it would be accepted into Better Humans.

Actually, creating a well-written article on Medium is pretty easy.

• You can format your article using the tools they have to add quotes, new sections, and titles.
• You can search for pictures on Unsplash without opening a new window or having to manually write the credit.
• And if Medium’s tools aren’t enough, you can also attach Grammarly to your Google Chrome to make sure your writing is free of mistakes.

Despite all that, I still see blogs with big blocks of text, barely any formatting, and full of mistakes. Is it any wonder those articles won’t get posted in any respectable publications?

If you use your common sense and the tools provided to you, you shouldn’t have to spend hours on a well-written Medium article.

What’s left now is to turn a well-written article into a good article.

Here’s how I did it.

I read other people’s articles.

This is the first thing you should do before writing your own content on this platform. Look at what the content of some of the successful bloggers here looks like.

Despite having minored in writing, I didn’t know how to format a blog article or a Medium article. That’s not what I was taught. Yes, it did give me an advantage, but writing for Medium is something you have to learn separately.

The good news is that it doesn’t take any more effort than to check out some successful articles to know how to format yours.

I took an editing course.

As I mentioned earlier, I did study writing at university. One of the courses that delivered the most value to me was a course in copy editing.

Online editors like Grammarly are very helpful, but they can’t detect everything. Robots don’t usually understand things like context or style, so you shouldn’t solely rely on digital tools.

I’m not saying you should enroll in a college program to learn how to edit. You can find free courses, tutorials, and resources online.

I chose the right place for my story.

I set my sights on Better Humans for two reasons:

• They were looking for self-improvement stories.
• They wanted the story to be driven by deep personal experience.

My article embodied both of those things. So I knew it would be a great fit for Better Humans.

Most pubs are looking for either personal experience or research to back up the article. The other thing to look for is what publications are looking for stories related to your topic.

Either way, there’s a place for your story.

I followed the rules.

Another reason I think I got accepted on my first try is that I carefully read and followed the rules of both Medium and the publication.

They were pretty easy to follow.

I had already written the article and picked where I wanted it published. Once I read all the requirements, all I had to do was make a few tweaks.

I gave something to the reader.

Last, but certainly not least, the content of the article will be the deciding piece of the puzzle.

I gave my readers a solution to a problem — improving their sleep.

If you were able to check off the rest of the list, congrats. But if your article doesn’t have anything of value to offer to the reader, why would the pub bother publishing it?

What I’ve learned during my short time on Medium is that the key to a successful non-fiction story is value. Give as much of it as possible.

There you have it. A good article is:

• free of mistakes
• well-styled
• submitted to the right pub
• follows guidelines
• provides value

I believe that my draft was all of those things when I submitted it and that’s why I was confident it would be accepted.