Publications on Medium: How Do I Submit Stories to Them?
And a few more tips on growing your audience.
Publications on Medium, by Medium
These are the biggest, most visible publications on Medium — these are the ones you see across the top of your browser when you enter Medium’s home page:
POPULAR shows trending stories across the platform. MOMENTUM is a new blog (not a publication) about the fight against anti-Black racism. CORONAVIRUS is a blog about the current pandemic. The rest of those links are to official publications of Medium.
The #1 rule for submitting your writing for publication is this: Look for the publication’s submissions guidelines. Understand what topics and styles of writing they are interested in including in their publication. Then follow their instructions to the letter.
Having trouble finding their submissions guidelines? You’re not alone. But when all else fails, use one of the major internet search engines, and do a site search, like this:
site:medium.com onezero guidelines and (submit or submissions)
To learn what each of these publications is looking for and how to submit to each of them, see the first search result: “Submit Stories to Medium’s Editorial Group.”
Independent Publications on Medium
Anyone can create one or more publications on Medium, and some are considerably more active than others. On the one hand, an active publication gives your work a wider potential audience immediately, but it is still no guarantee that your work will be widely read. If the publication is very large, and has a large number of writers already, your stories may be lost or buried in an avalanche of submissions.
One of the large publications I submit to often is ILLUMINATION.
Although there are hundreds of writers, there are also thousands of readers, and the Editor in Chief, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, actively encourages interaction between the writers, through Slack, and between writers and readers, by periodically requesting feedback from readers regarding what they like about the publication and what they want to see more of. There is a great deal of transparency, and it is a thriving, vibrant publication.
How do I submit my writing to ILLUMINATION?
ILLUMINATION has a very active staff of Editors who strive to make the process easy, quick, and painless as possible. The submission guidelines are detailed and clear, and this would be a great place to start and to practice following them. The Editors would be grateful if you followed directions; they will give you feedback if you don’t. Friendly feedback, of course.
For any publication on Medium, you can go to the main page and then add /about to the end of the URL. For example:
This page gives a general description of the publication and lists all Editors and Writers. Dr Mehmet Yildiz gives Editors and Writers a larger platform by encouraging each to submit an autobiographical story to help readers get to know them better:
And then there are interviews, as well:
This is one of the secrets to running a successful publication as well as to growing your audience on Medium, as a writer, in general — promote others as well as yourself.
But I would suggest placing your work with multiple publications, because this is how it is when you’re a working writer — it’s a good discipline to develop early on. Here are some of the independent publications you’ll find my work on:
MuddyUm makes sure its contributors are clever enough to write satire and silliness by trying to hide their submissions guidelines:
See that little “SU” right there, after the pipe symbol? That’s the link you want.
Bing or Google Search:
site:medium.com “rogues gallery” guidelines and (submit or submissions)
Then again, they make it easy! There’s a prominent link, right on the front page:
The Google or Bing search is a little tougher here, because Writers’ Blokke has several stories with general tips for writers on submitting work for publication — not necessarily just on Medium. But they make it easy for contributors with a nice big obvious link, “Write for Us.”
Medium and Medium Staff might want to consider making “Submissions Guidelines” a standardized part of any publication on-site, so that there would be one consistent place to look for this information.
Then again, this hodge-podge hunt is probably better preparation for the real world, for novice writers, than a well-organized and coherent process would be.
Why Not Start Your Own Publication?
First, in order to become more familiar with how publications are laid out, how they work within the realm of the Medium platform, and how to operate one, start your own — just for your own work.
- You cannot submit a single story to two or more publications.
- You can withdraw a submission (even after publication, though that might be frowned on, especially if you make a habit of it, and is a big no-no on most non-Medium publications).
- If you withdraw a submission after publication, then resubmit to a different publication, this will not change the publication date on your story — you cannot make an old story new again! The practical reason many publications require or strongly suggest that you submit only Drafts is because previously published work will fall way off the front pages fast — if it ever appears there at all!
But, to breathe new life into your older work, you can create new stories of your own, link within them to your older stories — wherever they may be published — and add them to your own publication.
Each publication can have its own Followers and a newsletter, so you can send out emails (that also become stories in your publication) to keep Followers up to date on the stories you’ve been writing and publishing. See mine:
I was frustrated that there was no good way to organize my own work — to make older stories easier for me to find! So I created one story for Fiction, one for Non-fiction, one for Poetry, and one for Writing Advice. About once a week, I update those with the new stories I’ve published on Medium.
Under Trending, you’ll see the newsletters I send out now and then — also about once a week. If you Follow the publication, you’ll see what those look like when I send them out. How’s that for a sneaky hint?
Once you become more familiar with how the publication features on Medium work, you may want to create one and open it for submissions from others. It’s a nice way to pay it forward, and to help other writers gain more visibility. Start small, with just a few writers you know. Make sure you understand and have a good flow for editing and publishing submissions, once you have some from other writers. Run it and keep it small for a week or two, until you’re comfortable with it and have a good sense of the work involved and what you want your publication to look like. Be sure you won’t lose interest — no one likes to submit work, only to feel ignored for days or weeks on end. Readers will leave, too, if you don’t feed them fresh, new stories on a fairly regular basis.
Nuts and Bolts
But how, exactly, do you “submit” a Draft?
Once you’re added as a Writer or Editor of a publication, you’ll see Add to publication at the top of the overflow menu (the three dots). Click the three dots, then click Add to publication.
Select the publication you want to submit to, then click Select and continue. For this example, I’ve clicked ILLUMINATION:
If the green button says Publish, not Submit, stop. It means that you have forgotten to click Select and continue. (This happened to me several times — I clicked something else, and the menu disappeared — I thought that I had finished the process, and ended up publishing my Draft rather than submitting it to any publication. Be careful with this step — click Select and continue!) Now, click Submit:
Be patient. Gone are the days of sending a manuscript off in a box with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, only to wait four months for a form-letter rejection. But the Editors are human, and they do not necessarily cover all time zones. They need sleep. Your story may need additional work. They will read it, make sure that it meets their editorial standards, and perhaps make or suggest changes to you. Pay attention! If you get notified that there are private Notes on your Draft, read them! Make any changes that have been requested and reply to the Note so that Editors know you’ve done the work they asked you to do.
They may come back and say, “This is not for us.” That’s okay — if that happens, you are then free to submit it to a different publication or scrap it, rewrite it, and try again. This is how it works in the real world. If you get discouraged on Medium, it’s not quite time to try your wings “out there,” yet.
A big thanks to Sharon Hurley Hall and Bob Jasper for asking some excellent questions this week that prompted me to delve deeper into a process that could be a little more straightforward than it is. If they didn’t have all the answers, I figured maybe none of us did!
I hope this helps to demystify the submissions process on Medium; if I have not answered your question, leave a comment below and I will do my best to update this.
