The 14 Most Common Mistakes We See in Invisible Illness Submissions (Updated Feb 12, 2024)

Avoid these pitfalls to up your chance of getting curated

Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash

As the Invisible Illness publication grows, our team of editors is starting to give some of the same feedback repeatedly. We thought it might be helpful to collect that feedback in one place to speed up the feedback process and help you avoid these errors.

— Your Invisible Illness Editorial Team: Ryan Fan, Juliette Roanoke, RNand me, Meredith Arthur

1. Exploiting the reader’s worries in your headline, aka “clickbait. When writing for Invisible Illness, it’s very important that you follow Medium’s new guidelines around clickbait (released Dec 2020). As editors, we will be editing in line with these guidelines and you should as well.
2. Using a “this worked for me and it can work for you too” approach. Include research that backs up coping strategies instead of just listing anecdotal evidence. This will help set you apart from the pack.
3. Not attributing quotes or research studies. Attribution is a requirement on Invisible Illness pieces.
4. Using this photo.

This Unsplash photo is just overused.

5. Writing “research says” without including an attributions or researcher name. Similar to the other attribution mistake, but of a slightly different variety.

6. Forgetting to include a sub headline. We find a specific sub headline can often be stronger, and do more heavy lifting, than vague headlines.

7. Opening with generic photos and/or long paragraphs of text without establishing your credibility first. Readers want context. They want to know who you are and why they should read your piece.

8. Using this photo.

Another Unsplash photo we see way too often.

9. Not addressing mental health head-on. Invisible Illness isn’t a productivity or relationships blog. We’ve received a lot of very general posts lately that are nebulously about emotions but don’t actually discuss mental health directly. Our posts need to be about mental health.

10. Leaving notes from other publications on your submission. You might not realize it, but we can see all previous notes when you submit a story to Invisible Illness. When we see rejections from other publications sitting in your notes, it is not confidence-inspiring.

11. Giving up on formatting, particularly with poetry. We’ve learned that a lot of writers don’t know you can use shift + enter to add a new single-spaced line. Medium also automatically capitalizes the first word in the line when you hit enter, which is also something you want to avoid when writing poetry.

12. Using this photo.

Another Unsplash photo we see way too often.

13. Submitting an emotional poem that isn’t really about mental health. It’s easy to label an abstract poem as mental health but if it doesn’t read that way others (especially the editors) then it doesn’t really fit Invisible Illness.

14. Trying to pack a bunch of self-promotion into the call to action at the end of your post. It’s OK to share a link with more info at the end of your post, but if you are linking to your YouTube page, newsletter, Patreon, podcast, and a bunch of other Medium articles, we are probably going to turn you down.

We’ll be adding to this list as we see trends appear. Our goal is always to help you be as successful as possible with your Medium writing. Hope this helps!