How to Write for Invisible Illness
A step-by-step guide to getting started
Hello new writers!
What follows is a step-by-step guide of how to join Invisible Illness, Medium’s largest mental health publication. We are always working to demystify the process, and make it easier. Hope this helps.
If you’ve never written for Invisible Illness before…
If you are a writer who has never written for Invisible Illness before, please use this Google Form to submit yourself as a writer for the publication.
This form exists only to be added as a writer. You’ll still have to submit your essay if you are accepted to Invisible Illness.
In the form, you will be asked to share a link to your user profile. Here is what that links look like: https://medium.com/@mudaba
You will also be asked for a mental health writing sample in draft or published form on Medium. If you’ve never written about mental health, you probably won’t be accepted into our writing community.
How you’ll know if you’re accepted as a writer at Invisible Illness…
You will hear back from this form via email from one of our publication editors if you are accepted as a writer. If you hear nothing back after two weeks or more, assume you have not been chosen to be a writer on the publication. We would love to write you all back, but we are a busy crew and don’t have extra time to spare, sadly!
If you’re already an Invisible Illness writer, but you’ve forgotten how to submit a story…
If you’ve been accepted as a writer for Invisible Illness, your next step is to:
- Hit the three little buttons at the top of your screen.
- Choose “add to publication” for your post.
- When you do, you’ll see this screen:
- Choose Invisible Illness from the list and hit “Add draft”
- Once you’ve chosen Invisible Illness, one of us will get notified about your submission and we can take a look at it. Again, it could take up to a week for us to review your story, depending on how backed up we are. We get many, many submissions every day, so we do our best to stay on top of the queue!
Remember to properly attribute all artwork and photography
To properly attribute a photo, you have to make sure you have the rights to a photo. If it is a copyrighted image, ask the photographer or company for permission, and document the fact that you were granted permission.
If it is your personal photo, you have the rights. Caption under your photo “photo by the author” to claim the rights to your photo.
Some stock photos are free to use — the most common sites are Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, and Wikipedia Commons (there are also paid stock sites if you’re looking for more options). In the caption, cite the author and the site and hyperlink where you found the photo. The magnifying glass option on Medium does this for you for Unsplash photos. Your attribution should look like this:
And remember that you can only submit drafts to Invisible Illness
Unfortunately, we are only accepting draft submissions at this time.
Important links for all Invisible Illness writers
- Writer Guidelines for Invisible Illness
- The 13 Most Common Writer Mistakes We See at Invisible Illness
- Invisible Illness Welcome Letter
Thank you everyone!
The Invisible Illness team aka Ryan Fan, Marie Raven, Juliette Roanoke, and me, Meredith Arthur
