The ILLUMINATION Editors Work Tirelessly Helping Authors to Bring Their Stories to Life — Part 2

Here are more practical tips for new writers.

6. What are the rules and guidelines for publishing on Medium.com?

Medium frowns on plagiarism in any form. They do not allow duplicate content.

Engaging in threats of violence and incitement, hateful content, harassment, privacy violations, reputation, personal information collection, deceptive conduct, copyright or trademark infringement, SPAM, exploitation of minors, or graphic content is not tolerated.

If you need a refresher course on Medium’s Rules, now may be a good time.

Medium.com does welcome thoughtful and civil discussion, as do most publications.

7. How do I embed images and videos in my Medium stories?

Let’s cover adding images to a story, then talk about videos.

Click the + sign, and the New line pop-up appears. You can upload an image from your computer (the first button) or Unsplash a royalty-free website (the second button).

The minimum image size Medium’s image editor accepts 692px (width), and the height can be any size.

Medium’s image editor supports images up to 25MB in .JPG, .JPEG, .GIF, and .PNG formats.

Once the image is inserted into your story, you’ll notice a green border around the photo and an Alt text prompt at the top of the picture.

Click on the Alternate text prompt to add a brief description for visually impaired readers.

For instance, “Aerial view showing Woodland Park, Colorado.”

Click on the (Type caption for image (optional) at the bottom of the photo to enter a citation or caption. Image captions are optional, but adding a source is not. You can publish your story to Medium’s general population without citations. If you distribute your story through a Publication, they’ll likely want you to attribute each photo. If you’re the owner of the image, say so; if not, cite the author (photographer, graphic designer) and a link to the source image.

Here’s a sample citation for a photo I pulled from Unsplash.

Photo by Oscar Sutton on Unsplash

A video can be added to your story by choosing the third button on the New Line pop-up.

The same attribution rules apply to videos.

8. How does Medium.com handle copyright and plagiarism issues?

Medium’s plagiarism guidelines state, “Under Medium’s Terms of Service, users are required to either own the rights or have permission to post the content they publish on Medium. Please note that crediting the source does not supplant the need to secure permissions.”

Each Publication may also have plagiarism guidelines, and Violators may be barred from publication.

9. How do I edit or update my published articles on Medium.com?

Go to the story page, choose the three dots ( … ), then select Edit story.

Once the changes are complete, Medium automatically saves the changes.

Next, choose, Save and publish.

10. How do I add links and calls to action to my Medium articles?

Let’s first discuss how to link to a previous story. There are two possible options.

First, you could add a hyperlink to a piece of text.

Here’s a link to the story I posted on Gaining Your First 100 Followers.

Highlight the text and choose the link from the pop-up menu.

Then add the link.

Here’s a link to the story I posted on Gaining Your First 100 Followers.

The text will now be underlined with the hyperlink.

You can also use the New Line pop-up to add a link to a story.

Here’s an example of linking Medium’s Rules in a sentence. The process is the same. Highlight the text and add the hyperlink when the pop-up appears.

If you weren’t able to catch Part 1, you’d find it here:

You can find answers to many more questions in my latest book on Amazon.com.

Every new writer to ILLUMINATION must review the critical points in the onboarding pack, which has several useful references:

Here is the checklist which helped many new writers:

Here’s ILLUMINATION’s photo handling policy as well.