Reach more people with your writing
Hello Invisible Illness!
Thanks to you, our growing community of readers and writers, we’re able to create a dynamic space where brave voices speak your truth every day. In the past six months, the Invisible Illness editorial team has grown (yay!). With more bandwidth comes more ways to improve the publication and amplify our reach with your stories. We want to help you grow your readership.
We’re starting by creating this work-in-progress brief style guide and resource list. Does information like this helps you? Let us know in private comments or with written response posts. On to the guidelines…
How to get more people to read your Invisible Illness stories
Did you know that Medium’s editorial team reviews stories and selects some to be featured in a variety of ways? (Don’t be embarrassed if you didn’t. Our own Meredith Arthur recently learned how curation works herself).
If your story is chosen for curation, you can look for an up to 40% increase in views to that story. (Stat taken from Dec 2019 breakdown thanks to Marie Raven, but results may vary. Nothing is guaranteed when it comes to curation). Curated stories are distributed in “topics”, the homepage, or the app. It may even reach people who aren’t following you or Invisible Illness.
How do you get curated?
There’s no exact formula getting your story curated, but there are some Medium guidelines that can help you get considered for curation. Take a look at them, noting the examples of content Medium will not curate.
Invisible Illness columnist Nikki Kay created this in-depth primer on the ins and outs of curation. Take a look! You’ll notice that formatting plays a big role in your changes of being curated. Medium’s title, subtitle, and quote formatting options were each intended for very specific uses. We like Casey Botticello’s extensive guide to formatting tools.
These guidelines are meant to help you
Sharing these helpful tips does not change the requirements for writing for our publication. We prefer well-proofread work that is free from major errors. Our editors may make minor formatting changes to submitted pieces in support of readability and curation potential (like updating title case or header type.) No changes will not be made to the actual content of the piece. Since our time is limited, we only make changes as editor time allows.
Jump to the front of the editorial line by doing this one thing
Since Invisible Illness sees hundreds of submissions monthly, we will be prioritizing the review of unpublished drafts in the publication queue. Stories that have already been published are still welcome to be submitted and we will review all submissions in as timely a fashion as we can. However, we want to cut down on the review time for pieces that are not yet live on the platform and therefore cannot be read at all.
Thank you all for all you do to support the community! Again, please let us know if these guidelines are helpful, or other questions you may have about building your readership.
Reference links:
- Medium Curation Guidelines
- Nikki Kay’s Absolute Basics of Making Money on Medium
- Medium Article Formatting Guide
- Invisible Illness Writer FAQ
- Invisible Illness Contribution Form (for first-time Invisible Illness authors)
