Submission Guidelines | Illumination | Editorial

Illumination Submission Guidelines

A quick run-down on how to get the best out of your stories

“If you want to join our growing, enjoyable, and supportive publication as a writer, please leave a message via this link. We help you become a successful writer on Medium.” Dr Mehmet Yildiz

Application form ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications on Medium.

Hello, fellow Illumination writers!

We’re getting more and more submissions from newly lit lights in our Illumination community. And as per our promise to you, we’d like to help you in getting your articles published quickly. Our editors ensure that all your articles see the light of day as soon as possible.

In order to make this process a little easier both for you and us, unfortunately, we can’t avoid setting up some guidelines. This is to ensure that our editors won’t get stuck on one of your articles, unsure whether they can make the right changes or wait for you to answer their request.

The following guidelines will cover the most important steps you can take to ensure your article fulfills Medium standards. We’ll explain proper formatting and how you can achieve it.

So let’s take a look.

A Proper Title

It all starts with a proper title. You’ll need to highlight this first line of text and make sure it is set to “Title Case” — the big T in the small popup that shows above the text.

As you can see, to the left of the text, it shows “Kicker”, “Title” and “Subtitle”. These only show at the topmost text of your page, letting you know that Medium recognizes this TitleCase as the title of your whole story.

It is often recommended to write each word of the title with an Uppercase letter, like “These Five Squirrels Run Like Hell”, however, it’s not a must.

Subtitle

For the subtitle, you will need to highlight it the same as with the title, but this time select the “Subtitle Case” — the small T next to the big one.

This will be a valid subtitle. Most importantly, Medium will use this subtitle as a short display. If you don’t have a subtitle set, it will use parts of your first paragraph to show instead, which can look messy if you start with a long paragraph:

As you can see, this story shows a lot of text under the title on the Illumination front page. If you set a subtitle in your story, that subtitle will be shown instead.

A subtitle can add much more cleanliness to your story, and leave a better first impression.

A Kicker

The small text above the title is called a kicker. I am not sure where it shows apart from the article, but I use it as a way to “categorize” my own articles. In this guide here, I’ve used “Submission Guidelines | Illumination | Editorial”

To create a kicker, simply place this text directly above your title and format it in subtitle case, just like the subtitle.

If you want to get these vertical lines I used here, they are called “pipes”. The quickest and easiest way for me to type a pipe is to hold the Alt-key on my keyboard (Windows user) and type 0124 on the Numpad.

Mac users should be able to create the same by holding down the “Option”-key instead of the Alt-key.

Correct Use Of Images

Medium best practices require that your article has at least one image to use as a title image. An article without a proper image (width at least 600~ pixels) will likely not see much reader traffic.

Luckily for us, adding in an image is easily done, thanks to Medium’s cooperation with the stock-image provider “Unsplash”.

Simply click on the Plus-symbol when on an empty line and select the magnifier.

This will open up a search bar to look for images on Unsplash. Type a keyword of your choice, such as “lemon” and simply select the image you’d like to add to your article.

You can then simply click on an image you like and it will automatically be inserted into your article, including the necessary source citation at the bottom. Please note the small “next” in the upper right corner of the image search. You can click on it to load the next page of images.

You don’t need to worry about licensing or whether you are allowed to use an image this way. All these images are free to use.

Alternatively, you can insert your own photos and images into the article by clicking on the camera symbol instead of the magnifier glass of the little menu.

But you need to make sure that these images contain a citation at the bottom, naming the owner of these images. Notice that I even tagged each and every image in this article with “Courtesy of Kevin Buddaeus (Author)” without exception. Captioning photos is a necessary second step (the first is making sure your photo is licensed for free use) to assure there are no copyright violations or licensing issues with your photo.

Do not take random images from Google, these are in most cases licensed by certain people or companies. It is your responsibility to ensure that you have all the rights to use a specific image.

For a more in-depth look at image captioning, please see this story:

Image Size

When you insert an image into your article, you will be greeted with this option:

You can choose any of the three sizes to the right for the lead image in your story. The in-text option to the left is best for pictures further down in your article as the image can partially mesh into the text as the little picture indicates.

Using the most narrow picture might look better in handheld browsers, however, the widest image can often be the most striking presentation for readers.

Alt-Text

Alt-text is a description of what the image contains, so people with impaired sight, who rely on a text-to-speech program, can still understand what is shown.

By adding in alt-text (one or two sentences describing the picture) you can make your stories more accessible. Google’s crawler will also index this information and in some cases return the favor with a better SEO rating.

Tags

Once you’ve written your article and hit the “submit” or “publish” button, you will be asked to add “tags” to your article.

Tags help your article being distributed into fitting categories. Some Tags are more useful than others, but only certain tags are eligible for top writer status and for curation. If curation is your goal, you should pick your tags from the suggestions in the articles below. If not, any tag will help Medium to categorize your story.

For ILLUMINATION the tags Innovation, Business, Personal Development, Poetry, Fiction, Philosophy, Diversity, Fusion and Serendipity are always good fallbacks if you can’t think of anything more specific.

The tags in the image above are the ones I used for one of my articles, which got curated for the topics “SELF” and “WORK”.

You can use up to 5 tags per article. In my opinion, using less than 5, in any case, would only be wasted potential.

Two great articles pointing out the most popular tags and topics that are eligible for curation can be found here:

Quick Help With Grammar

Our editors do the best they can to correct wrong spelling, fix typos, and add missing letters without overstepping their boundaries of interfering with your creative freedom.

If you want to have a handy helper for your own writing, use “Grammarly”. It’s free, works within your browser and Medium helps you on the fly with making corrections.

But note that no software can replace your own two eyes. Sometimes it might give you a suggestion that is not really the best choice. Listen to your own guts for that. It certainly helps in streamlining your writing process.

Adding Links

There are multiple ways of adding links to your article. All of them are fairly easy once you figured them out. Apart from just plain copying a link into your article, you can hide links in the text to keep it clean.

To do so, either highlight the text you’d like to add the link to and click on the chainlink symbol in the popup

Or (my preferred method) just insert the link into the highlighted text with Ctrl+V.

The text will now be underlined, showing that it contains a clickable link.

You can also insert Medium articles as links in your articles like I did above. If you want your link to look like the card above, simply paste the link into your article. It will keep looking like a plain link until you hit Enter to jump to a new line.

You can embed Youtube Videos and other media in the same fashion.

For a more in-depth look at using links in your stories please see this story:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Did you know that you can do some dedicated search engine optimization for your articles?

Search Engine Optimization is a big topic in copywriting, as it has a huge influence on how well a website fares on Google’s search ranking. It might not be as useful or even necessary for Medium articles, but going the extra mile won’t hurt.

While editing your article, click on the three dots next to the submit/publish button. From the list, select “More Settings”.

In the window that opens up, go to “SEO Settings”.

As you can see, I have not optimized the SEO for this very article either. The title is luckily alright as it is. But the description needs a push.

The SEO Description is the text that is shown under a website link in Google’s search results. It should ideally not be over 160 characters. Medium recommends 140–156 characters. It’s the first description a Google user sees from your article. He’ll decide whether your article is relevant to him or not. So make it count.

It should describe the website as briefly as possible with as many relevant keywords as possible. So let’s change it.

The new description is 149 characters long (Good) describes the content and purpose of this site (Good) and uses certain words (like Illumination, Medium, stories, writers) often enough to let Google know that they are important (Good).

A small CTA (call to action) at the end might make non-Illumination-writers curious enough to click on the link and discover us.

Important Tip For Changes To Published Stories

Let’s assume you have written a great story, and it’s already published. But oh no! Big typo in the title!

Your first action will be to open the article, edit it, and fix the typo in the title. Problem solved, right? Unfortunately not!

Even if you correct the error in your story, it will still show up on the front page of Medium and publications. Why?

You need to click on the three dots while in editing mode, then select “Change Display Title / Subtitle” from there. That is the change that will be shown when displaying your article. Changing the title in the article itself won’t change the title shown outside of your article.

I saw someone having a typo in their title, but it was not visible in the article itself. This is the reason.

So if you change the title or subtitle from an already published story, remember to change the display title / subtitle too.

How To Tag People

Tagging people so that they will get notified about their mention is simply done by writing @ following their username. The moment you type the @, a dropdown menu opens.

You know a name is tagged properly when it shows in color on the page like Kevin Buddaeus.

Avoid Excessive Tagging of People

Tags are a great way to give credit to other writers on Medium or ask people to comment or engage with your writing.

However, they can be overused. Consider whether your tagging of another person will be a welcome gesture or an annoyance.

Medium does not allow blatant or overt marketing. Excessive tagging might be seen as a form of marketing your stories and soliciting for reads or follows. Be aware of this before you tag people.

Avoid Undisclosed Affiliate Links

This too is part of the official Medium Guidelines.

We are not allowed to use affiliate links without disclosing them as such.

If your article contains such links, we are unable to publish it until you remove them or write a clear disclosure notice preceding them.

If you use Twitter, make sure your Medium account is linked

We still sometimes see people who have an active Twitter account yet forget to link it to their Medium account.

Why is that important?

If we share your Story with our official Twitter account, it will read the name of the Medium writer. If that writer has his Twitter account connected, Medium will use the Twitter handle instead. This means you will get a Twitter notification about @illum_official tweeting your story. People will be able to see this and directly connect with you through Twitter.

If you have not connected your Twitter account yet, then the Tweet will only contain your Medium name, without any link. Your Twitter account will be ignored.

So please, if you are active on Twitter and haven’t already, connect it to your Medium profile. It is an easy step.

Click on your Medium profile picture in the upper right corner and go to “settings”.

From there, you can go to “Connections”, in order to connect with Twitter and Facebook. For Twitter, entering your Twitter handle is all that is needed to connect.

From then on, whenever someone uses the Tweet function on one of your articles to share on Twitter, your handle will be inserted.

Please check it out. It’s full of golden knowledge.

Final Words

I may update this article with more information as I discover it. Maybe I have missed something too. Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

If you follow these steps, our editors should be able to publish your articles as they come in. Of course, you also need to make sure your article follows the Medium Rules.

Our editors would technically be able to make all these changes for you. But this is a very time-consuming process, with hundreds of articles daily.

Furthermore, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, our founder, values your freedom above all and dislikes editors making changes to your personal property without notice. This is what sets Illumination apart from the rest.

You might find the links to our publications in the following list.

ILLUMINATION ILLUMINATION-Curated ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR ILLUMINATION Book Chapters Technology Hits SYNERGY Readers Hope Illumination on YouTube Illumination Gaming ILLUMINATION’s Blog

Now thank you for reading, time to write something!

Kevin is an editor and writer for the ILLUMINATION publication. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.