Want To Stop Pissing Off Your Editor?

Do this. It works surprisingly well.

I’m on a mission from God — a quest to find out what I can do to keep my editor as happy as a kitten on catnip. After all, I’m pitching an article to POLITICO in September — and I want to make sure not to ruffle their feathers on my way to publication.

But it turns out that my mission is over even before even I started it.

You see, I talked to eight editors from seven top Medium publications — all of which have at least 16K followers, and one whose readership tops 225K — and what I found intrigued me.

For starters “pitching” Medium publications isn’t hard — because most editors require nothing elaborate.

Yet, I found many editors provided similar responses when I asked them the question “What did a writer do to annoy you as an editor in the last month?”

The answer is shockingly simple, so you better pay attention, especially if you hope to build upon your experience writing on Medium — so you can pitch to POLITICO, or another major periodical.

Benjamin Davis, an editor of Sexography, which has 29K followers, put it succinctly.

“Don’t be an asshole,” said Davis. “I don’t think editors are supposed to talk like this, but man, it’s sickening, and every editor I know gets driven up the wall by it.”

According to Davis — and other editors I spoke to — prospective contributors show inappropriate behaviors that most of us are supposed to have flushed out of our systems when we graduated from kindergarten, no matter what country they were raised in.

A common theme that I found when interviewing these editors was the refusal of prospective writers to read their submission guidelines before submitting articles, thus petitioning the editor to publish an article that falls out of scope of the publication’s focus.

Zuva Seven, editor of An Injustice!, which has 16.3K followers, publishes articles on race, feminism, gender, LGBTQIA and similar topics — but prospective contributors have pitched articles way out of the editors’ interest.

“We sometimes get pieces on ‘how to be a better writer,’ and it’s just a waste of the writer’s time as well as ours,” said Zuva.

While all Medium publications that accept articles from writers have submission guidelines posted on their websites, editors sometimes helpfully email authors links to those guidelines when these writers submit articles that don’t adhere to their publications’ rules.

Even then, some of these writers still ignore the publications’ guidelines, several editors told me.

“It’s like — we do this for free and have lives and jobs and aren’t going to waste our time on people who refuse to follow our guidelines,” added Davis. “Following the guidelines isn’t even the most annoying thing — it’s when people get upset you send them guidelines.”

In a similar vein, some writers don’t follow instructions, said Brittany Jezouit, editor of Better Marketing, which has more than 100K subscribers. For example, before posting articles in Better Marketing, Jezouit requires authors to add ‘ALT text’ to images — which helps people with visual impairments read articles. To assist these authors in adhering to publication guidelines, Jezouit sends authors instructions on how to add ALT text to their articles’ images.

“Just this week, three authors replied saying ‘great, I’ve added ALT text!,’ but they did it in some way that our article specifically instructs them not to — like using it as an SEO hack,” said Jezouit.

Another problem that editors frequently face is dealing with writers who just can’t wait to have their articles published in a timely fashion, said Andrei Tapalaga ✒️, editor of History of Yesterday, which has 22K followers.

Quite a few of these writers expect their articles to be published immediately, according to Tapalaga.

“Some writers simply do not understand that we are a team of three handling over 300 writers, from which I could say 100 are dedicated to submitting on a weekly basis,” said Tapalaga.

It’s clear that many of these middle-aged writers need to be sent back to kindergarten — or perhaps nursery school — to learn to be functioning adults — before they can be allowed to submit articles to Medium publications, much less POLITICO.

For starters, they can test whether they have the willpower not to gobble up a delicious-looking vegan, gluten-free, kosher, keto, low-carb, dairy-free chocolate chip cookie — that a responsible adult has sternly told them not to eat until they finish their vegetables.

Meanwhile, your standard-issue editors have their work cut out for them. Editing publications, especially large ones, takes empathy, said Joel Mwakasege, editor of Be Yourself, which has 154K followers.

“I once suggested a story be edited a certain way,” said Mwakasege. “The writer of the story was furious. She then went on to elaborate [that] it was because she was so taken aback by my intention to make the story work that she moved past her initial reaction.”

For me, one key takeaway from interviewing the editors of these diverse publications is that your editor can be a helpful resource. If you follow their publications’ posted guidelines and listen to their advice, you stand to end up with a better article — which more people will want to read.

Some authors can be overzealous in their quest to make money with the articles they write.

According to Justin Cox, editor of The Writing Cooperative — which has 227K followers — some writers pitch “the ‘how I made $xxx’ stories… because people want to read the secret that will net them a bunch of money.”

But writing for money on any platform isn’t easy, said Cox. “They don’t want to accept the truth that making money writing online is like anything — it takes work, time and a commitment to quality.”

I will not give any guarantees about how many viral articles you’re going to get by listening to your editor, but I would caution you against relying on the seminars that are taught by successful Medium writers.

What worked for them may not work for you. And if you get stuck on tricks, techniques and hacks, the quality of your articles will suffer.

“I think it’s deceptive to sell the fever dream of spam-publishing your way to $30K a month,” said Davis. “I personally find the practice of making the majority of your money writing to tell other people how to make money ethically dubious.”

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