Modern Women: Submission Guidelines

How to write for Modern Women

There is no one way to be a woman in modern times, but there are shared experiences, knowledge that is hard won and wisdom to be offered.

✨Whatever aspects of life you are juggling, we’d like to hear about them, because it’s in sharing our stories that we empower ourselves and support others.✨

As we navigate the modern world, we do so through the lens of being a woman and we are interested in hearing the feminine perspective on every aspect of life from your experiences in the work place, to your thoughts on race, politics, religion and culture. The feminine doesn’t have one homogenized reality; we at Modern Women want to see the unique truth of who you are.

Our Publication — Modern Women

• By Women for Women — anyone who identifies as a woman is welcome to write their perspective
• Ageless — women of all ages and demographics are welcome
• Diverse — we cover all backgrounds and life stories

Type of Voice

We’re looking for writing that is a combination of:

Heartfelt Down-to-earth Real Open Honest

We are looking for articles that are memorable, that once you’ve read them you feel like you are in some way better for it. Whether that be because you see yourself reflected in the words, because you’ve learnt something new or seen something in a new way.

Types of Stories

Modern Women is a publication intended to elevate, inspire and empower women. We do this by sharing our heartfelt, down-to-earth and real stories.

Our publication accepts a broad range of stories about topics you care about. We want to read about what matters to you.

We organize our stories into these specific categories:

1. Self: Stories about you, life lessons, struggles, how-to’s, advice, memoirs, desires or anything that speaks to our relationship with ourselves. Tag: Self
2. Relationships: Stories about relationships and partnerships of all kinds, be they platonic or romantic, are welcome. We want to hear about dating, marriage, friendships, and family relationships; if you’ve got relationship insights, we want to share them. Tag: Relationships
3. Motherhood: Stories about anything and everything to do with motherhood and parenting from conception/adoption to empty nesting. Tag: Motherhood
4. Careers: Stories about your career, life in the workplace, creating a business or making a living in whichever way you choose to do. Tag: Careers
5. Society: Stories about the world and what matters to you such as feminism, race, politics, culture, beliefs, norms etc. Tag: Society Every month we also offer a new writing prompt which you can find at the top of our home page. You can respond to the current prompt for the month or have a look through any we’ve published and see where the muse strikes.

Tags

For your first tag, we encourage you to use the tag Women to help rank our publication for other women.

For the second tag, please select one or more of the following tags to be organized in our publication pages: Self Relationships Motherhood Careers Society

The other tags are entirely up to you, take a look at what other writers use and be deliberate in your choices, these tags are how your stories will be seen by the Medium audience so you should always use all 5.

I honestly can’t stress enough how important tags are to your work being seen by the right audience. I wrote a short piece specifically about this below.

Titles and Subtitles

Have a clear and descriptive title and subtitle at the top of the story. Use title case for the titles and sentence case for the subtitle. See the attached article on tips for new writers if you need help with this.

This is one of the main things the editorial team ends up having to send writers pm’s about which delays your work from being published so please take the time to do this before you submit.

Pictures

Take some time to find a good picture to support your work. Where the eye goes the attention follows, and nowhere is that more clear than here. Use royalty-free images like those from Unsplash, or Pixabay, etc.

If you do want to source images elsewhere, please ensure they are high-resolution ones and always remember to credit the original source and where you got the image from and to provide web links to both the image and the platform you found it on.

Poetry Spacing

If you hold Shift while hitting Enter, you can get single spacing for poetry which makes for a much better reading experience.

Get Started

We are always accepting new writers. To be added to the publication as a writer, just drop a response below with the words “Please add me as a writer I’d like to contribute” or something similar, and leave your Medium @username. You should be added within 72 hours.

It is essential that you provide your Medium username, you can find this on the url of your profile page.

Please also follow Modern Women if you haven’t already, along with the editorial team to support us and help build this community.

Submit A Story

Once you’re added as a writer, you can submit your stories. When editing your story, click the … in the top right corner to add to the Modern Women publication. At this time we’re accepting both unpublished drafts and published work so long as it hasn’t been posted in another Medium publication.

You may republish to your personal blog or other non-Medium publication after a month but will need to state that the piece was first published on Modern Women.

Only one article per day/per contributor is accepted.

We recommend that all submissions are ‘metered’ or locked content. By placing your piece behind Medium’s paywall you create the potential to earn money for your hard work through Medium’s Partner Program.

Monthly Writing Prompts

Every month we also offer a new writing prompt which you can find at the top of our home page. You can respond to the current prompt for the month or have a look through any we’ve published and see where the muse strikes.

After You Submit

We aim to be a responsive publication and we have an amazing team of editors, all working in different time zones so that we can work with you quickly and efficiently to get your work out there.

We will respond to you within 48 hours with either a private note of feedback or publishing your story. Please make sure your private notes are on so that we can communicate with you about any formatting changes that need to be made or any other suggestions our editors might have. To do this just go into Settings, Account and click ON to allow private notes on your articles.

There will be times when the editorial team are busy in their own lives, when this coincides with a busy queue of submissions it might take a day longer than normal, please be patient, we like to give each piece the attention it deserves and will either contact you via pm to discuss any changes that need to be made, publish your work or return it to you if we feel it is not suitable for us at the moment.

Questions?

If you have any difficulties, questions or are unsure about anything to do with Modern Women, feel free to contact me directly via email at [email protected]

A Word of Warning

The editors of Modern Women will not publish hate speech of any kind, that includes political, religious, racial, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status and cultural discrimination.

We may ask you to add a trigger warning to your subtitle if we feel that is necessary to give our readers time to make the decision for themselves about what they feel they are open to read at any particular time.

Most Important!

Get lost in the process and be passionate about what you have to say.

Happy writing & reading!

If you are new to the Medium platform this article will help you navigate the basics of formatting, photo crediting, how to create titles that will get your work the attention it deserves and how to build your community of readers.