Guidance

Publication Conduct Guidelines for Three Levels of Writers

Rules of engagement and cross-pollination at three levels on Illumination Integrated Publications

Introduction

If you want to be a successful writer, you need to understand the rules of engagement for our publication and the overall platform.

The purpose of this post is to make our publication guidelines crystal clear so that writers can get the best out of our services.

ILLUMINATION is rapidly growing. 15,500+ writers are contributing to our publication now. We are delighted by the contributions of so many writers. This is an excellent position for us to serve our readers better. The critical success factors for this desired position are diversity, inclusiveness, and service excellence.

Diversity and inclusiveness come with a cost.

With growth comes new challenges.

In this post, I want to address these challenges and provide clear guidance to our writers at three levels.

Let’s start with the first level, which reflects most of the challenges.

Level 1 — Fundamentals

This is the most problematic and time-consuming level for our publication. This level ironically includes only 10% of writers. L1 issues consume 90% of our time. Therefore, I want to make the rules crystal clear.

We love new writers and enjoy giving them a chance to grow, but some new writers take the privileges for granted.

Publication services are privileges for writers, not rights.

Different publications have different goals. Our goal is to create an opportunity for all writers to showcase their stories and gain an audience.

Our publication is not commercial; volunteering editors run it.

Keeping these basic facts in mind, we want to remind the new writers to consider the following six items to get the best out of our services and become successful.

1 — Submit only your best work for our readers.

Your stories must be the type of content that you want to read.

Publications are not random content dumping places. They are designed to bring writers together and produce presentable content for readers.

Readers expect reasonable materials. You are presenting your content to an audience who is interested in your experience, thoughts, and feelings. This audience is your customer base. You cannot take them for granted.

When you are submitting your story to a publication, always ask these two questions:

Why should this audience read my content?

What is unique about my content?

2 — Caption your copyright-free photos with source links.

This is one of the most time consuming and stressful situation for our publication. Our editors are tired of writing a myriad of comments and wait for responses from writers.

Writers must understand this fundamental rule. This 30-second job is causing days of delay, frustration, and interfering with productivity.

This week, we will reject stories with photos of missing captions and not indicate the copyright rules. This item is non-negotiable.

We don’t want to waste more time on this fundamental requirement.

3 — Do not submit plagiarized material.

We only accept stories written by you.

Medium does not accept plagiarism, and it is illegal in the industry. ILLUMINATION has zero-tolerance for plagiarized submissions. Our editors have expertise in detecting plagiarism by using different methods and various tools.

We removed 100+ writers for the last seven months. Our analysis shows that 99% of these writers were non-paying members, possibly with multiple fake accounts. Our editors are paying more attention to these accounts, and we are assessing suspected accounts using a new system that we are developing.

The ramifications are severe for writers attempting this illegal activity.

We reject the plagiarized material. Report it to Medium and remove the writer from publication. We will not accept the writers, who commit this illegal activity, to our publication again.

Please see the attached article for our position and details.

4 — Submit only one story a day.

Considering contributions from 9,500 writers, it is not possible to cater to multiple submissions from each writer.

We allow our prolific and experienced writers to submit up to three drafts within 24 hours. Since they submit high-quality materials, we don’t have to spend too much time on these types of submissions.

However, until they improve their writing skills and gain acceptance by readers, some new writers are recommended to submit only one story a day. Especially writers who cannot handle the fundamentals mentioned in the points stated above that clearly state our guidelines to only submit one item in a day.

Our editors do their best to improve and bring them to a reasonable state. We know that some readers prefer raw writing, but we still need to adhere to common quality standards.

As an exception, new writers who want to submit curated stories can submit as many as they want. Curated stories usually depict quality and acceptance by a specific audience.

We want to save 90% of our editorial time due to 10% of writers causing the grief. This post confirms that we add rigor to the process.

5 — Respond to your private messages.

Medium allows communication between publications and writers only via private messages. If your private messages were turned off, you would not receive a notification.

Please check your story for * sign, which indicates a private message. This sign can usually be on the upper part of your story.

Editors may request you to fix an issue in your story. Please acknowledge and address the issue in a timely manner. We cannot hold stories for more than 24 hours in our queue. If no response is provided, we will return the story.

6 — Learn about the platform rules and expectations of your audience.

We are working on a large and complex platform. I touched on the publication rules, but the platform rules are critical too. All writers must learn the rules of the platform and get to know their audience.

The most important rule is to understand our audience and adjust our writing practice accordingly. I shared my experience and simplified the rules for new writers.

In terms of platform rules, many new writers benefited from this story. This story focuses on fundamentals and some advanced topics for writers.

7 — Always declare your affiliate links

Here is the Medium rule about using affiliate links:

“You must disclose affiliate links or payment for a post. Affiliate links, such as link out to Amazon with your code, or any other link out where you will receive a commission or other value, are allowed in posts. But, you must disclose somewhere in the post that it includes affiliate links. If you have received payment, goods or services, or something else of value in exchange for writing a post, you must still disclose this fact in writing within your post (as per FTC Rules and Guides).”

Level 2 — Improvement and Progress

70% of our writers submit reasonable stories for our readers. I categorize them in Level 2 (L2). Our readers enjoy and appreciate these stories. Many readers included ILLUMINATION as their first page of reading browsers. Our followers are increasing rapidly. We now have around 45,000 followers.

However, improvement never ends. Readers expect interesting and authentic stories with a personal touch. Introducing new topics and styles are essential to keep the current reader base and gain new readers. It is crucial for writers to take reader feedback seriously.

Another important point for this level is conducting peer reviews.

Feedback is important to all writers. We can learn by teaching and sharing our experiences. Connecting with new writers and paving the way for them can provide mutual benefits.

We help our writers to collaborate via a mentoring initiative. We created a communication platform where you can collaborate with other writers. Our Slack group can be very useful to meet new writers and develop collaborative relationships.

You can request access to Slack from this link. Please see the benefits and operations of Slack from this story authored by Tree Langdon. Tree is our Slack champion and help our writers generously to succeed.

The next important point is creative ways to amplify our messages and create a new audience. ILLUMINATION invests substantial time and effort in amplifying stories of our writers using various communication and social media tools.

Please see this resource to understand how you can use social media wisely.

Level 3 — Excellence

Working with accomplished writers is a pleasure.

20% of our writers submit outstanding stories delighting our readers. Some of these stories gain remarkable visibility and reading times. Some even go viral.

To accommodate the needs of these top writers, we extended our services by creating a special collection. This collection is another publication called ILLUMINATION-Curated operated by the same editorial team.

We invited top writers to participate in this initiative.

The pilot program was completed successfully. 1,000+ writers contribute to ILLUMINATION-Curated. We have thousands of curated stories that we distribute daily to our readers using various methods.

You can access our outstanding stories from this link.

To further improve the cross-pollination among our level 1, level 2, and level 3 writers, we created several initiatives. The next initiative is a recognition program that we are developing. We will share details of this and other exciting initiatives in upcoming posts.

The most recent two initiatives we introduced were for poets and fiction writers who appeared to be the most disadvantaged groups from visibility and readability perspectives. To address the issues and find effective solutions, we created two initiatives. We named them poetry and fiction clubs.

You can find more information about these collaborative clubs.

To help our L2 writers to transition to L3, we established a program and provided the required guidance. Many top writers started submitting their drafts to ILLUMINATION-Curated.

Conclusions

In this post, I provided an overview of the challenges for three groups of writers: beginners, experienced and accomplished.

The biggest issues happen at the fundamental levels, which consume substantial resources of our publication. We need to address the issues at the fundamental level with more rigor. These fundamental points are low-hanging fruits and do not require extensive skills. These basic points are common sense and can be resolved with some attention to the rules.

We are happy with our Level 2 writers and help them to grow rapidly and reach the next level. This growth requires mutual investment from both writers and the publication governance team. As the publication team, we take necessary measures and recommend the same focus to the writers. Our publication is a tool dedicated to your successful writing career.

Level 3 writers delight our readers and make our governance team joyful. Our plan is to grow the number of our Level 3 writers. We can achieve this goal by empowering our Level 2 writers and successfully transitioning them to Level 3 status. We also plan a number of new initiatives to enhance vitality.

Cross-pollination is an effective strategy for the sustainable growth of ILLUMINATION. We value our writers and aim for their success by helping them.

Please help us help you by submitting the type of materials that you want to read.

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