WRITING
Submission Guidelines for Invincible Career®
How to write for this publication
The overall goal for the Invincible Career publication is to share engaging stories that help others take control of their careers and lives. The best stories tend to have helpful personal examples, interviews, research, high-quality data, etc.. We want the stories to be useful as evergreen content to help people for years to come.
The general tone of the publication is optimistic and empowering. Everyone deserves to have a great life, a fulfilling career, and live up to their full potential!
A link to the submission form is included at the bottom of this story, but please read our guidelines first. If your story doesn’t meet them, it won’t be accepted.
The themes of the publication
Every story must align with one or more of our themes. These include:
- Career
- Job Search
- Interviewing
- Negotiation
- Leadership
- Entrepreneurship
- Retirement
We love inspirational stories about ambitious people who have taken control of their careers so that they get to call the shots in their work and life. For example:
- A person who found the secrets to where the best jobs are hidden
- People who have figured out smart strategies for interviewing well to land a great job
- Someone who navigated corporate complexity to receive a significant promotion
- An employee who left a 9–5 job to start her own business successfully
- Someone who discovered how to be more confident and take ownership of his career and future
Be compelling, authentic, and educational
Each submission should include a personal anecdote to draw the readers into your story, whether it is about you or someone else. We want stories to feel real and compelling.
Tie your story to a meaningful career, leadership, or life topic. Have a personal opinion and point of view on the issue, but support it with links to relevant research, data, and other high-quality articles. For example, if you say that “more people are becoming entrepreneurs now,” what study or article can you link to that supports that claim?
Ideal story length
We prefer to publish stories between 900–2,000 words. Medium has researched the ideal story length and found a sweet spot with a 7-minute reading time.
The types of stories we publish include:
- Opinion essays with supporting research and data
- Detailed how-to stories
- Thoughts about the future of work
- High-quality interviews with intriguing and relevant people
- Personal narratives that provide useful advice and guidance for others
Here are some examples:
Take note of the formatting, image attribution, and links to additional references. Check the archive for more examples.
Formatting guidelines
Stories should be carefully structured and edited for grammar, spelling, readability, and cohesiveness. We suggest that writers use tools such as the Hemingway App and Grammarly to clean up story drafts before submitting them. It also helps to read your story out loud or have friends provide useful feedback.
All submissions should have a featured image below the title and subtitle. You must either own the rights to the images included or use a free stock photo site that lets you use images with attribution. Some of our favorite sources are:
We love stories with high-quality media throughout the story, too (e.g., photos, illustrations, video, data, charts, GIFs). In general, images sized to 900x400px tend to work best on Medium.
Please be complete with your attribution for a photo to include three links: one to the original photo, another to the owner, and the last link to the website hosting it. As an example, see the attribution line below this photo.
We retain the right to remove images from submissions and replace them with those that our editors pick.
Please use Medium’s formatting features; title, subtitle, headers, quotes, italics, etc.. Clean formatting makes an article easy to read, especially in the mobile app. There are some excellent guides on Medium around choosing compelling titles, using the right formatting, etc.
You should also become familiar with Medium’s content guidelines and rules. For example:
- You may not sell advertising in or on your member-only content.
- The predominant purpose of a story should not be to drive traffic to an external website, business, or product.
- If you have received compensation, free goods/services, or anything of value in connection with the topic of a story, you must make this clear.
- Similarly, you must disclose affiliate links (e.g., Amazon affiliate links to a book). For example, you can put this line at the top of your story: “Disclosure: This story contains affiliate links.”
- Do not ask for claps or include other calls to action, including gifs of clapping, requests for donations, or other links or embeds for the purpose of capturing user information or soliciting money.
Only submit unpublished drafts
Since we want to get your story the most exposure possible, we prefer unpublished drafts over published stories. Submitting a draft also allows us to make private notes and request any clarifications or edits.
Medium’s algorithm favors fresh stories, and our homepage is sorted by the date when the article was published (not when it was accepted into the publication). The longer it has been since a story’s original post date, the weaker that story will usually perform.
We reserve the right to alter and edit your story
The Invincible Career® team can edit the content of your story if we find spelling or grammatical errors. We can also add our logos, bylines, images, etc. to your story.
If you remove our content and edits after your story is published, your story will be removed from Invincible Career. You will also be removed from our list of writers.
We want to promote you
Once we have published your story in our publication, we ask that it remain in Invincible Career. We will not accept articles from writers who publish with us and then publish the same story elsewhere on Medium (i.e., essentially a duplicate of the story).
We will only publish author bylines that are up to 10 sentences long. Please feel free to include 1–2 text links (e.g., to your profile and your personal website). Anything longer will be removed (including author photos, newsletter forms, excessive links, etc.).
Publication time
Our review and response time varies. If you haven’t heard back about your story submission within 72 hours, please assume that the story won’t be published.
Complete the form
Please fill out this form to have your story submission considered for publication. If your story aligns with our themes and meets our quality guidelines, we’ll be in touch soon.
Thank you, we look forward to your submission!
