Writing | Guidelines

Writers — An Important Change You May Have Missed

We Listen To Our Writers

“Of all the skills of leadership, listening is the most valuable — and one of the least understood. Most captains of industry listen only sometimes, and they remain ordinary leaders. But a few, the great ones, never stop listening. That’s how they get word before anyone else of unseen problems and opportunities.”

— Peter Nulty, Fortune Magazine

In case you didn’t get the memo, there was another recent change to our submission guidelines.

Our writers spoke and we listened.

It’s great news for our writers. We shared the update as soon as we made the changes, but some writers are still asking about it so I thought I’d post a clarification.

This summer, as our volumes increased and we had many volunteer editors working to assist our writers, we realized it was important to write a formal set of Submission Guidelines. We wanted everyone to be on the same page.

One thing we decided to change was our practice of accepting previously published articles.

We made this decision after a lot of input and discussion.

• There had been a recent surge of submissions from writers who had decided to move many of their articles over to Illumination. They would send ten or twenty articles at once, clogging up the queue.
• Writers who had submitted draft stories, which hadn’t yet seen the light of day, were disadvantaged as we sorted through the large volumes.
• The publishing queue became very long, delaying the publication of everyone’s articles as we sorted through the volumes.
• Pre published articles are essentially stale dated. Medium is very data-driven, so these articles would end up in the archives almost at once.
• Then we discovered a string of articles that were plagiarisms. They were direct cut and paste pieces, pre-published in the writer's name, and then submitted to Illumination, hoping for quick acceptance.

It was the last straw.

We wrote submission guidelines that stated effective September 1, 2020, we would no longer accept pre-published articles.

There was a grace period.

We published articles but added a note, reminding writers of the change and asked them to submit drafts in the future.

Little by little, the volumes eased somewhat and we breathed a sigh of relief as we were able to return to our previous goals of quick publication for all.

There was quite a bit of feedback from established authors who were moving their blog posts over to their Medium accounts. They made a strong case for why we should shift back to accepting pre-published articles. They had some valid points.

We listened carefully and then we made the change.

There was one small adjustment we made to our processes.

When we are faced with an ever-increasing queue of articles to publish, with our quality checks and plagiarism attempts in mind, we review and prioritize DRAFT articles.

We focus on publishing the work of all writers at Illumination, you know that. We are happy to welcome your previously published work here.

If you’ve previously published an article it’s had a chance to be seen, sometimes in another publication. Draft articles are fresh writing and we are honoring that.

We are again accepting previously published articles at ILLUMINATION. Here are the revised guidelines.

“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.” ― Bernard M. Baruch

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