Is ILLUMINATION On Steroids?

A quick rundown on our publication’s current success and its organic growth

Hey everyone,

this is just a quick update on how we are faring as a whole publication, thanks to our incredible amount of readers without whom our writing would be meaningless and the talented writers who continuously put out fresh and exciting content.

There are many publications on Medium, only a few can say of themselves that they belong to the top of this platform. And by the way things are looking right now, we are on a good way to join this mile-high club pretty soon.

Top Pub ranking

For those who are unaware, Top Pub is a website that collects and stores data from all publications on Medium and ranks them in regards to how many followers they have and all that. In short: It’s a Leaderboard.

They have a total of 734 pages with 15 publications per page. As of right now, Illumination is in the upper half of page 27.

This means that within 3 months since Illumination was created, the publication rose up 707 pages and passed around 10,605 other publications.

Going all mathematical, this means on average we jump past 118 publications per day. Of course, this process moves on a logarithmic scale, since the biggest pubs we have ahead of us have more than 75 times the amount of our current followers. We won’t get past them in mere two days. It will still take weeks or months to get there.

But our growth is undeniable.

Our editors and writers are also leaving reviews on Top Pub. Feel free to join in!

One of our editors, Arthur G. Hernandez (who claims to not be a data scientist) has spent much time collecting more in-depth data to compare our growth rate, percentages, and more. Please check out his article below.

Although his data is since a few days old and I’m sure he’ll release an updated version soon, it gives you a good insight into how well we fare in numbers.

Update 5/25/2020: Arthur has written an updated article with new stats. According to his data, we’ve grown by 60.3% over the past 20 days! Check it out for the full stats!

Why is growth that important?

It’s really not. We’re not sitting around a table like lunatics from a marketing agency, drooling over which tweet could gain the most followers. We’re just writers who support each other. If Illumination would always be stuck on let’s say #150 in the ranking, I wouldn’t shed a tear.

But there is a quote I really love:

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.“ — Maya Angelou

And the growth displayed above means that more people are interested in reading our stories. If we only had 10 readers who’d follow us, but 100 writers who put their heart into their writing, then chances are, only a handful of them will ever be noticed on each day.

But the more followers and fans we attract, the more exposure we get. This means that more people will find you and your stories.

My opinion on Illumination

First, let me get this out of my system: Yes, I’m biased. Yes, I’m an editor here. But I don’t earn a cent for being one. I still only earn money through my own writing. In fact, it’s hard to be an editor AND write your own stuff. So it might even cost me money. I don’t really know. And I don’t care either.

Our goal here is to publish everything. As long as it fits the official Medium rules, we’ll publish it. And our aim is to publish them soon. We’re not an entrepreneurship-focused pub (The Startup), we’re not a love-focused pub (P.S. I Love You), we’re not a writing-focused pub (The Writing Cooperative) or any other of those. We take everything and anything.

And like any other writer, I still also try to publish in those. Never put your eggs in one basket, right?

But my experience so far has been mixed. It often takes days to get a story published (I submitted a draft to Age of Awareness two days ago, it’s still sitting in my draft list) and personally, I’m pretty much impatient.

One example is this article of mine:

Originally, I submitted that draft to “The Writing Cooperative”, since it’s a writing article, sure enough, an interesting topic to anyone who calls themselves a writer and all that. I waited for I think 4 days. No response. No private notes. Nothing. I still don’t know whether they rejected it or if they just didn’t have time to check it.

But I withdrew it from their pub, submitted to Illumination, and got it out immediately. Now it is curated for writing.

Maybe it would have gotten 1000 more reads if I went with them, who knows. But I simply don’t like being kept waiting. If your publication can’t check submissions within let’s say 12 hours, that doesn’t mean you are just too popular and got too many submissions. It means you don’t have enough editors. If you want to run a one or two men show, then, sure enough, don’t take more writers than you can handle.

We now have more than 700 writers. And more editors joined our ranks to help the existing crew with our mission to put out submissions in a timely manner. That’s how it should be. There’s nothing exclusive about keeping you waiting for a week.

We’re growing incredibly fast and I appreciate all the work our team has put into it. I’d also want to publicly apologize for not doing much recently. For the last week, I got caught up with work and my own life, so I took the selfish route, publishing my own stuff, then disappearing. I’ll make sure to come back into my old routine shortly and be of more help. Especially with the huge influx of new writers who have joined us.

If you’re reading about Illumination for the first time and are a writer interested in joining a publication, please check out this article by Timothy Key. It will tell you all you need to know to join us.

I welcome all new writers!

Kevin is an editor and writer for the ILLUMINATION and Polyglot Poetry publications. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.