ILLUMINATION-Curated
Yes, You Can Now Directly Write For ILLUMINATION-Curated
However, your stories must meet Medium curation guidelines
Since I sent the post about inviting writers to ILLUMINATION-Curated, I received many inquiries about the process and procedures.
The previous post was related to nominating already published stories on ILLUMINATION for transferring to ILLUMINATION-Curated. This requires you to nominate your selected stories by submitting them in a story.
However, the purpose of this post is to add clarity to my previous post by answering the most frequently asked questions in recent inquiries. Since there were many inquiries considering we serve over 4,500 writers, I thought that the best way to address these inquiries would be to post an article.
The most commonly asked question is related to submitting to the publication directly. As you may know, initially, we allowed only selected writers to submit stories directly to ILLUMINATION-Curated, however now we open the submission to all writers. We want to give an opportunity to all writers who deserve to gain visibility to a broader audience.
Here are the three common questions and my answers.
1 — Can we submit our articles directly to ILLUMINATION-Curated?
My answer to this question is yes.
We are ready to cater your needs and support your writing goals.
However, we have prerequisites for submitting to ILLUMINATION-Curated.
The essential requirement is any story submitted to ILLUMINATION-Curated must meet the Medium curation guidelines.
The stories also must appeal to discerning readers of this publication.
What does this mean?
This means, in addition to the quality of stories, our editors also assess your stories for suitability for our specific audience.
For example, readers of ILLUMINATION-Curated are not interested in stories on how much money you earn in Medium and how many followers you gained in a month.
Diversity and variety are essential for our readers. We don’t restrict topics as long as they meet the Medium rules. To this end, we cover over 100 topics. As long as your story has substance and important messages for readers, we will consider them.
We also don’t censor content as long as your stories meet Medium rules.
In addition to Medium curation guidelines, ILLUMINATION-Curated established a set of criteria to improve quality of publishing.
Here is a summary of our criteria.
1. Your story must be easy to read
2. Your story must meet high editorial standards
3. Your story must have value for the reader
4. You must write for the reader
5. Your story must be complete
6. Your story must be rigorous
7. You must write honestly
8. Your story must give excellent reading experience
9. Your story must be formatted well
10. Your story must be clean
11. The images must be appropriate
12. Too-wide curiosity gap disqualifies your story
The details are explained in this resource.
2 — What do I need to get started?
There are three key considerations.
Apply to be a writer
First of all, we need to add you as a writer to the publication. You can request access by sending a request with your Medium ID. Or you may leave a comment on this story showing your interest in being a writer for ILLUMINATION-Curated.
Use Medium curation guidelines
You need to check Medium curation guidelines to ensure the content and formatting of your stories align with the curation guides.
Submit as a draft
Since assessment and editing may take a while, we recommend submitting drafts only. As you may know, if your story is in the draft format, when we publish it, the story will use the date it is published. If it is published and our assessment may take a few days, the story will take the date it was submitted.
We will consider exceptions for time-sensitive materials. In this case, you may point out your circumstance with a private message when submitting.
3 — How can I improve the quality of stories?
I recommend five practical approaches.
1 — The first approach is to read the Medium curation guidelines.
I recommend creating a checklist of the points in the guidelines. You can review these points before drafting your story. You can also use the checklist after completing your draft and before submitting it to the publication.
2 — The second approach is to learn from the experience of other writers.
We developed several references to improve the quality of your stories. Reviewing these stories can give you practical points reflected from the experience of other writers.
Here are three important guidelines that our editor Dew Langrial developed for you.
Curation Guidelines for ILLUMINATION Writers — In Simple Words
99% Bulletproof Curation Methods That Can 4x Chances of Your Success
How to Transfer an Article From Illumination to Illumination-Curated
3 — Reading curated and high-quality stories to learn from their style.
We created multiple volumes covering hundreds of high-quality stories covering many topics. You can use a keyword search to find stories from these collections.
4. Conduct Peer Reviews
One of the best approaches to improve content quality is to obtain peer reviews. As the owner of the content, you may be biased, but your peers can provide different perspectives wearing a reader’s hat.
You can join our Slack to find peer reviewers. Please request access.
Peer reviewers can identify your blind spots.
For example, they can find typos which may be overlooked by us and not noticed by language tools.
This point brings us to the next important step.
5. Use Language and editing tools.
I recommend the use of spell checking and grammar tools such as Grammarly.
It can be useful to use some editing tools such as Hemingway Editor.
Another consideration is applying a plagiarism check to ensure your content is not duplicated on Medium or other content platforms.
There are many tools on the market. The full version of Grammarly has a feature of plagiarism checker. In addition, there are several other tools, such as Chegg, Copyleaks, PlagTracker, and Plagiarisma.
Conclusion
I answered the most commonly asked questions about contributing to ILLUMINATION-Curated directly.
I hope my answers and instructions can help you get started quickly. We look forward to your contributions.
Our readers will be delighted with fresh content from new contributors.
Thank you for reading and considering to participate.
To join our vibrant publications, please send a request via this link.
