Submission Guidelines
Please read this article carefully so that your submissions are properly formatted, allowing us to publish and get them disseminated as quickly as possible
NOTE: We are a new pub and as such, will likely have to alter and update this list of guidelines on a rolling basis, so please check back frequently for updates.
After volunteering as an editor on Medium.com for several years, I’ve come to understand how frustrating it can be as a writer to maintain guidelines and conform to the schedules of different pubs. Because of that, and since I’ve enjoyed my time working with Dr. Mehmet Yildiz, the founder and owner of the ILLUMINATION family of Medium publications also known as the Illumination Integrated Publications, I’ve decided to craft our submission process largely after theirs.
For example:
- Veritas True Crime will allow you to self-publish your stories before submitting them to us for publication, however, you cannot first submit them to any other pub. If you do, your story will not be able to be published in VTC.
2. All submissions to Veritas True Crime must be true-crime-related. Unfortunately, we do not accept fictional crime stories, rants, or opinion pieces about various aspects of crimes, victims, suspects, or the cops investigating them. If you write a comprehensive true crime story and want to insert any or all of that somewhere in there, that’s fine, but we cannot accept op-eds or straight opinion pieces. That’s what the comments section is for.
3. Veritas True Crime requires all submissions to be at least 100 words in length (if it is a poetry-related true crime piece) or a minimum of 250 words for any other type of article.
4. All submissions require at least 1 properly annotated image. Proper annotation means that all images must indicate what source location the image was captured from or what software was used to create it — and this is true whether it was created using an AI image creator, or by using a canned image creation software like Canva or Adobe.
The same is true even if the image was captured off of Wiki Commons or some other open-source image warehouse. All images must also have ALT text attached to them and the source annotations MUST be in caption form beneath the image for every photo. There can be no exceptions to this — these are Medium rules, not ours. This is by no means an exhaustive list of image criteria. For a complete list of all image-related guidelines please click here, or visit the page called Image Inclusion Guidelines.
5. No plagiarism or AI-generated stories will be tolerated or accepted. All of our editors will be equipped with AI and plagiarism-checking software. If your story returns a score of more than 25% probability of either infraction, your story will be removed and your privileges to write for VTC will most likely be immediately and permanently revoked — again there cannot be any exceptions.
This list is not all-inclusive. These are really only the biggest and most severely punished rules per Medium’s standards. Our experience tells us that most other issues are relatively minor infractions and will most commonly be dealt with by your editor attaching a private note to your article, either requesting more information or requesting you make some changes before resubmitting. Because of this, please make sure that you have your settings enabled to allow private notes to be attached to your stories so that our editors can communicate with you privately.
Please check back here frequently for possible changes or additions.
I look forward to seeing your first stories coming across my screen.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it might be a good idea to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter if you want to keep apprised of when WOMEN will be conducting any contests or podcasting events that you might want to get involved in.