Oh Boy, So Now I’m An Editor
For a few days, I am an editor for Illumination. I feel honored, and I am aware of the responsibility. Here is my report about my first days in this new position.
When @myildizmel invited me to be both an author and an editor for Illumination, I hesitated at first.
My days are filled with a lot of work from morning to night. My new book should be finished by the beginning of June, and here on Medium I write an original article every day.
Also, I promote my articles, and I read as many pieces by other authors as I can. So I am not exactly underemployed.
When I told Dr. Yildiz my concern that the editor’s job might be too hard for me, he reassured me. There are so many editors working for Illumination that there’s only enough work for each one to do in ten to fifteen minutes a day.
That seemed feasible, so I agreed. Only a few hours later, I was approved as an editor.
It was fascinating to be able to look behind the scenes of the publication from now on. Suddenly I could see the statistics of the entire publication. It is overwhelming to see these numbers. A publication with over 700 writers and well over 100 new articles per day has enormous traffic.
When I compare that with my own numbers, I suddenly feel very, very small. I see now that I am part of something huge.
But what does my new job look like? Basically, it’s quite simple. I get a message, both on Medium and by email, as soon as a new article is submitted for publication.
I then go to the Illumination drafting area and open the article.
First of all, I check to see if another editor has already left a comment. If so, I close the article again and turn to the next one, because someone else is already editing it.
Illumination is different from other publications. We editors do not judge the quality of submitted articles. As long as they comply with the Medium Guidelines, we release the articles.
The most common reason why an article is not published immediately is the lack of a source citation for the images used. The author will then be informed about the article and asked to fix the problem. As soon as the author reports that he or she has solved the problem, I look at the article again and unlock it if everything is in order.
Masses of emails
There is one thing I wasn’t prepared for when I took this job: The many, many email alerts that suddenly flooded my inbox.
Every editor is informed about every new article, so now I get more than 100 emails a day. If you don’t clean up your inbox for two days, you have a lot to delete. This can take a few minutes.
So I will have to make sure that my mail program filters and presorts the incoming mails effectively. Maybe I will create a new mail account for Medium.
I don’t know how I should handle the flood of messages on Medium myself. It isn’t easy to find messages informing me that someone has responded to or clapped for one of my articles. This is a problem because I would like to keep track of it.
But I’m sure in time I will learn to deal with it. The few disadvantages are not so severe that I would have to regret my decision.
The work as an editor is honorable and fascinating. I am grateful to have the opportunity to do it.
In a community, people must be willing to take responsibility for the big picture and do voluntary work. Nobody at Illumination gets money for the daily work for the benefit of the community. We, editors, are happy to provide authors with a barrier-free and speedy publication.
Illumination does not want to be like many prominent publications where authors sometimes wait over a week without ever getting a response.
Since I started publishing with Illumination in mid-March, the publication has grown tremendously. I’ve been with it from the beginning and am incredibly excited about where we will be in a year.
I will definitely write a summary of it here.
René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.
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