2021 Assemblage Submission Guidelines
Last Updated December 29, 2020
Thanks for your interest in Assemblage. One thing you have to understand about this process is that we are a highly curated publication. We don’t care about followers, following, and follow-for-follow. We care about writing, poetry, words, people, ethics, boundaries, fairness, and we care about our writers.
We want to write next to the best, not the masses. If you don’t read all the way to the bottom of this post, we will know and we will not respond to your request. We take this very seriously and if you don’t, that tells us all we need to know about you.
What is Assemblage?
- A collection or gathering of things or people.
- A machine or object made of pieces fitted together.
- A work of art made by grouping found or unrelated objects.
The Vision
- Creatives working together to build something unique.
- Different points of view.
- Contrasting tones.
- Disparate styles.
- Diverse rhythm.
This is Assemblage.
The Backstory
Assemblage was originally created as an alternative multi-author blog to Medium, on its own website created using Squarespace. The submission and publishing process was much more time consuming than on Medium and in the end, the determination was made that writers would be better served with the publication on Medium. So, we came back to Medium on August 21, 2019.
Assemblage had a successful first season of its podcast. Season Two is still under consideration and we have plenty of guests lined up. Any writer who is accepted as a contributor to Assemblage has the opportunity to be on the podcast as a guest. Assemblage is meant to be a collaborative enterprise and the podcast gives writers a chance to step outside of the screen and onto the mic.
Assemblage is the continuation of the now-defunct Medium publications, Redoubtable and Uncalendared. And now, Assemblage is the publishing arm of A Work of Fiction, Know Yourself, Loose Words, and Recollection.
In 2020, we published 1,128 pieces on Medium from 98 different writers. Our most-read essay had 136,000 views and 52,000 reads. We had two essays with more than 2,000 fans. These numbers are great, but we don’t write for the numbers. We write because we have to.
In 2020, we also had to remove our submission requirements and shut down intake because of the digital barrage occurring on Medium, as well as the widespread plagiarism and encouragement to apply everywhere. You can educate yourself on why we did it below. Really, if you want to write here, you should read about why we stopped adding writers.
Do you want to write for Assemblage?
Submission Guidelines
By submitting work to Assemblage, you are agreeing to all of the following conditions:
- We only accept unpublished drafts. We do not accept works already published on Medium or anywhere else, including personal blogs. We want your best work. Your fresh work. Not something that was never good enough to send anywhere else.
- We don’t accept sloppy seconds. If you submitted your piece to another publication and it got rejected, we don't want to be your backup. We want you to write personal essays or poems just for Assemblage. Period.
- Submissions must be properly tagged with at least one of the following: Creativity, Life, Love, Poetry, Self Improvement.
- Submissions may be edited for spelling, grammar, and format. We will never adjust your content. If we have comments, we will send you a private note.
- Submissions must be made through Medium. Here’s how.
- All submissions must include a featured image with proper attribution. If you aren’t going to use Unsplash through Medium, make sure your attribution is correct.
- We don’t publish everything. All stories that are not a good fit will be returned with a private note.
- Once a story has been published in Assemblage, we expect it to remain there. If a story is removed, without prior notice, we reserve the right to discontinue our relationship immediately. If you want to remove the piece, just ask first. It’s your work. We would just want to know why, but we aren’t trying to hold the work against its will.
- We do not support the removal of works for republishing to get better metrics. This will result in immediate removal as a contributor. We aren’t a testing zone to see what works and what doesn’t.
- We will publish only one piece per writer per day.
- We will accept only one submission per writer per day.
- Our turnaround time is quick, always within 24 hours. If you have an intended publication date and time in the future, please include it in a private note on the title. We publish every day of the year, between 10 AM EST and 12 PM EST. If your submission comes in after our publishing run for the day, it will be published the next day.
- If we add you as a writer and you don’t produce a draft in the first week, we reserve the right to discontinue our relationship immediately. We want writers who are excited to write for us, not to add us to their list of publications.
- Some supplemental info for poets to consider:
Read This Before Submitting
- Read this whole thing before submitting the form. There are easy signs to know when you have not read every word. If you fail to read the whole form and we can tell, based on your responses or your profile, we will not respond to your request.
- If you are including Assemblage in a spam sham of applying to as many publications as possible, please don’t waste your time or ours. We can tell and we won’t respond.
- If you want to write for Assemblage to grow your following first, we are not a good fit for you.
- If you don’t have a favorite Medium writer and/or do not read other people’s words on Medium, you don't have the commitment to the community that we are looking for.
- If you haven’t been writing on Medium consistently for the past three months, please check back after you have at least 10 published stories and/or poems before applying to contribute. We like writers new to Medium, but a lot of people leave. We want writers who have already adjusted to how Medium works.
- If you are worried about how many followers we have, how often our stories get curated, or are interested in pulling works from the publication if they don’t “do well,” we are not the publication for you.
- If you write for any of the following Medium publications, or any publication that is similar to these and their practices, you will not be added as a writer here. There will be no crossover writers. You do not have to remove any old works published there, but you will need 30 days clean before being reviewed for inclusion here. There is no guarantee that if you stop writing there, you will be added here.
- ILLUMINATION
- ILLUMINATION-Curated
- The Innovation
- Never Fear
- An Idea
- Data-Driven Investor
- Paper Poetry
- Be Unique
- About Me Stories
- Passive Asset
If you don’t understand why, read these:
Request to Write for Assemblage
We are different than many publications. We don’t want to have 100+ writers so all of your posts get lost in the shuffle. We actively recruit writers that we respect to write for Assemblage. That is our preferred method of adding writers. However, we are always open to new writers.
Writers who have not been asked to write for Assemblage will need to fill out the embedded form below. By requesting to be a contributor to Assemblage you are agreeing to all of the above Submission Guidelines. New writers are added on a rolling basis.
We do not want an open stable of writers who don’t produce. We want a small group of dependable and honest writers who are willing to produce relevant content weekly to monthly.
Please fill out the form below or click here.
Questions?
Feel free to email Jonathan Greene at jonathan@trustgreene.com with any questions.
This is not an invitation to add him to your email list.
