Become a Bare Naked Bravery Contributor

Welcome to Bare Naked Bravery — the place for courageous creatives to gain an extra dose of bravery to do what they’re called to do.

We feature stories of personal bravery and how-to’s for courageous creatives. We do this by using the subjects featured in the book Bare Naked Bravery: How to be Creatively Courageous as a topical framework — creativity, courage, vulnerability, imagination, improvisation, defiant expectation, friction, intuition, fear, constraints, contextual awareness, daily expression, community, honesty, risk, safety, mindfulness, getting yourself “out there,” self-care, and so much more.

This adventure started with the research for my book Bare Naked Bravery: How to be Creatively Courageous. I began to have research conversations with my heroes and heroines. Those conversations became a podcast. The podcast’s international listener base became a Facebook group. Eventually the whole wonderful thing became the online publication and community you see today. Hooray!

Our regular contributors and community members are an essential part of our mission to spread bravery far and wide. We’re honored to consider your application to join us as a regular contributor.

As a contributor your articles will receive mention in our regular round-up email newsletters, promotion across our social media platforms, and the bottom of each article has space for promotion of your own brave doings.

7 Steps to Becoming a Regular Contributor:

1. If you do not have a medium account, go to www.medium.com. Create your free account.

3. Fill in your profile, including your name, a short bio and a headshot.

4. Write your article! (or use the import feature to submit a previously published article as seen below.) Here’s a great article on How to Write Medium Articles People Will Actually Read.

5. Publish your article on medium as “unlisted.” Copy that unlisted article link for step 6.

6. Submit your application here.

Hooray!

Accepted contributors will receive a welcome email with next steps. If you are not accepted and do not hear from us within 2 weeks, then you are welcome to submit a different article.

FYI — Accepted contributors complete the following steps per article…

• Write your article.
• Do not publish, instead click on the three dots to the right. Select “Add to publication” from the dropdown menu. Select Bare Naked Bravery.
• If your story is missing any of the items on the submission checklist, you’ll receive an notification via the Bare Naked Bravery Trello board.

Submission Checklist:

• A title. Use this headline optimizer and aim for a score of 70+.
• A subtitle. Your subtitle is as important as your headline! We cannot publish or promote your post without one.
• A vibrant & colorful feature image under your subtitle. All images need to be royalty-free — We love anything from Unsplash and Giphy.
• Tag your story with “community” and at least 4 other relevant tags.
• Make sure to save your changes by clicking the “save” button at the bottom of the story toolkit or at the top of the page.
• Take a close look at our editorial guidelines below to make sure your story meets our editorial standards.

Submission Guidelines:

1. Cite your sources. This is not the place for bullshit. If your article makes mention of someone else’s work, link it and say so. Give credit where credit is due.

2. Don’t tell other people’s stories — Tell your own story of bravery. This means sooooo much more than hearing your second-hand version of someone else’s story.

3. We do not publish pieces that are deemed overly promotional. We reserve the right to suggest edits to your story accordingly.

4. Don’t get married to your feature image. We reserve the right to swap your chosen featured image out. (ex: some images get overused.)

If you’re importing a previously published story:

1. Log in to your medium account, click your account icon (aka headshot!) and select “Stories” from the drop-down menu.

2. This will take you to a page with all your stories. You’ll see a button in the upper right-hand corner with “import a story.” Click that.

3. In the next window, you can enter the original link for your previously published story. After your story loads, you can edit and format your post as you wish.

4. Do not click publish. Instead, follow the above directions for new contributors and repeat contributors. (We include a link to the original source on the back-end to ensure that our version doesn’t prompt an SEO penalty.)

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens after I’ve submitted my story for review?

After you submit your story, it will be added to our queue in the Trello board and reviewed by our editorial team. You’ll receive an email from Medium when your article is scheduled to be published.

How long will it take for my story to be published?

We try to publish stories as quickly as possible — our average turnaround is between a day and a week.

Once my article is published, then what?

We recommend all contributors share their published pieces on their own social media platforms. Each published article is automatically announced in the Bare Naked Bravery Facebook page and group.

How long should my story be?

Stories that are between 300 and 800 words generally perform best. Here’s a great article on How to Write Medium Articles People Will Actually Read.

Can I publish stories that I published somewhere else first?

Yes! Use the importing tool instead of copying and pasting the piece into a new post.

What topics can I write about?

Stories of personal bravery and how-to’s around the subjects featured in my book Bare Naked Bravery: How to be Creatively Courageous — creativity, courage, vulnerability, imagination, improvisation, defiant expectation, friction, intuition, fear, constraints, contextual awareness, daily expression, community, honesty, risk, safety, mindfulness, self-care, and so much more.

How often can I write?

As often as you like!