Motivation

Why Focus On Pie In The Sky?

There are better ways to visibility on Medium

“If you live for people’s acceptance, you will die from their rejection.” — Lecrae Devaughn Moore — Grammy award winning artist

I am inspired to post this piece after reading a story by Liam Ireland on ILLUMINATION yesterday. Liam shared his experience as a writer and editor in this post titled In The Pursuit of Success on Medium. The key point in Liam’s inspiring article is:

“Comparing publications like Illumination with Better Humans is like comparing apples with oranges. Even Medium superstar writers do not get a look in at many of those pubs at the top of Daniel’s table of statistics. At Illumination, everybody gets the same opportunity to be published and to start earning from it. We have from complete beginners, right up to such well-known and highly respected writers like Tim Denning, gracing our platform with their writings. My personal advice is yes by all means submit to those guys at the top, just do not bet your house on it. For me, Illumination is where all the action is at and that my friends and fellow writers, is where you should hang your hat if you really want to get on Medium.”

Medium has around 30,000 active writers. I don’t know how many writers contribute to those large publications regularly, but I am proud to give voice to around 10,000 of them in my six integrated publications. Since their inception the reality is one third of Medium writers have contributed to my publications within last 14 months.

Receiving gratitude and appreciation messages inspires and motivates me to put more energy, time, and effort to grow my publications despite getting absolutely no monetary compensation like the partner publications get from Medium. We support these writers with the effort of volunteer editors donating their time to help them.

Many writers with a few hundred followers on Medium try to give advice to other writers. Nothing wrong with sharing experience and giving advice. However, if the advice is unproductive and out of context we need to correct them.

A writer with good intentions recently recommends aspiring writers to target elite publications on Medium and putting ILLUMINATION to the bottom of the list alluding to us as a low impact publication.

Targeting those large publications is a good thing in theory, but it causes aspiring writers more harm than good to their motivation.

I am not against any publication on Medium. I respect all of them. They all have their goals trying to make their readers happy.

The problem for aspiring writers is being rejected constantly by established publications. Rejections hurt. And constant rejection causes them to lose motivation to write. We don’t want this to happen.

This issue is close to my heart. Like all aspiring writers, I targeted my stories on those publications in the beginning. I got excited and submitted my curated stories to some of those large publications. My curated stories waited in their queue for days receiving no acknowledgement and no response. I finally gave up and thought there must be a better way to create visibility.

I took personal responsibility and created a publication inviting 80 writers with whom I collaborated at the time. With contributions of these committed 80 writers, we attracted 9,800 writers within 14 months and gained over 95,000 readers. ILLUMINATION has become a significant publication as top 50 out of 17,842 publications.

We achieve these results without getting a single cent from Medium. It is just organic growth by word of mouth from these contributing writers. Their exciting and meaningful stories brought these readers. You can gain some perspectives on our progress from this story by Dew Langrial.

Many people who wrote about my publication were positive and optimistic. However, some people keep criticizing and creating allegations. One of the allegations is ILLUMINATION publishes everything.

This is far from the truth. Our editors filter articles. Yes, we give voice to a majority of writers who have something valuable to share with their readers. But we filter many stories against Medium rules. We detect duplicated content and particularly pay attention to plagiarized ones. We have removed over 200 writers who attempted plagiarism.

We don’t publish content with defamation, discrimination, and hate speech. I recently updated our conduct guidelines showing our position on this.

After ILLUMINATION’s success, we created five more publications and integrated them under the umbrella of ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications (IIP).

My publications helped generate close to a million dollars of income to our incredible contributors.

These integrated publications offer a clear roadmap aiming to take aspiring writers to the accomplished level. We support all levels of writers. Our integrated approach allows them to cross-pollinate.

You can find out our roadmap in this story.

I created a writing prompt for writers to introduce themselves, connect with other writers, and share links to their stories. Some writers have already participated in this prompt.

We help our aspiring writers to start with short form stories with 150 words and build to long stories using our writing prompts and challenges.

For example, I invited writers to a 100 day challenge. Many writers joined and are almost half way through this challenge. I noticed that quality of their stories is improving gradually.

Another great challenge is giving a goal to beginners to create 1,000 short forms posting new short form stories and amplifying their older ones to give them a second life.

Using the concept of ILLUMINATION Book Chapters, we also prepare our writers to become published authors. Details are provided in this story.

And we create visibility featuring great stories contributed by our writers regularly.

I am pleased that many stories are trending and receiving substantial views and reading times on ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications (IIP)

To give you an idea, here are some stats from the trending pages of two publications in IIP.

Trending articles on ILLUMINATION

Trending articles on ILLUMINATION- Curated

Last three days over 100,000 new visitors checked stories on ILLUMINATION and 80,000 checked ILLUMINATION-Curated.

Within last three months stories of our writers on ILLUMINATION received over two million views.

And over a million views on ILLUMINATION-Curated.

Now that you have seen these indicative numbers, you can appreciate a lot more what our publications offer to our writers.

But what the numbers don’t show is how much support we give to writers to help them get better. That’s the real value our writers get at ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications. Rather than choosing the easy way of rejecting stories, we guide and educate writers to improve and find their voice. This is the difficult road we choose, but it gives us pleasure to see the progress and evident results.

To support our contributors, we extended Medium capabilities to a virtual place where writers can easily connect with, chat, share, and collaborate using Slack. 7,400+ writers joined our Slack group and are enjoying our free service.

The SYNERGY, which just happens to be one of favorite publications for freelance writers. Geared just for writers, as Liam said, from complete beginners to the influencers. Many stories of Technology Hits have already gone viral. Hundreds of books chapters from reputable authors are published on ILLUMINATION Book Chapters. I invited published and indie authors who joined our journey.

So it is my pleasure, as publisher, to congratulate the writers and editors that have made IIP. We will grow sustainably and give voice to more writers.

If you are tired of waiting for stories, ignored, and rejected, don’t despair. We have several publications to amplify your great stories. You can send a request to join using this weblink. We are here to to help you.

Thank you for reading my perspectives.

About the author

I am a top writer covering several topics on Medium. I established ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR, ILLUMINATION Book Chapter, Technology Hits, and SYNERGY publications supporting 9,800+ writers and serving 137,000+ readers on Medium. You can Join my publications requesting access here.