Writer Guidelines for Invisible Illness writers (Updated Feb 12, 2024)
We want to support your work and help you build your audience.
Hello Invisible Illness writers, new and established,
The Invisible Illness editorial team has been hard at work for the past few months exploring ways to support your writing and get your work out to more people. To that end, we’re evolving our writer guidelines a bit to provide editorial support and reach more people. Our ultimate goal remains exactly the same: to provide the platform for you to share your stories and insights about mental health.
Other important links: How to Write for Invisible Illness, a list of the most common mistakes writers make when submitting to Invisible Illness, and the Invisible Illness welcome letter. If you’re a new writer who wants to contribute to Invisible Illness, you can join us right now by filling out this form.
1. We will only be publishing pieces that have not been published elsewhere before.
This is a big change from before. In the past, we accepted both previously published and draft pieces. As part of our need to support and focus, we are evolving this and only publishing drafts — new stories that haven’t yet been published elsewhere.
2. We are looking for personal essays and well-researched stories.
In the past, there has been some confusion about what makes an Invisible Illness story. We are working to tighten and clarify that, and it starts with focusing on personal essays written from the first person “I” rather than the second person “you.” We are looking for personal experiences struggling with, recovering from, or being impacted by mental or invisible illness as well as research-based articles from experts in the related fields. When we receive more generic advice or self-improvement articles, we will likely write you back: “Can you write about how X Y and Z have helped you/impacted your life or how you have integrated these actions into your personal sphere and resubmit?” Note: If you are exploring the world of meditation or mindfulness, the Beautiful Voyager publication is a great place to submit your work!
3. We will publish up to 15 new stories a day.
Like many of the sites in Medium’s publisher program, Invisible Illness is a high traffic publication. On average, we receive around 40 submissions a day. Moving forward we are going to cap the number of stories we publish to 15 a day so that every story gets a chance to be seen on our homepage, and every story gets the attention it deserves.
4. We will not publish self-promotional material.
It’s OK to include a link to your newsletter at the end of your piece, but the piece must be able to stand alone in the publication. If your story has a self-promotion vibe, we will not be able to include it in the publication.
5. All stories must feature attributed imagery.
We love photos and encourage you to use them in your writing. All stories need to featured image that is fair use with attribution. To properly attribute a photo, you have to make sure you have the rights to a photo. (If it is a copyrighted image, ask the photographer or company for permission, and document the fact that you were granted permission.) This is a requirement of curation as well, so it’s a win-win all around.
6. All stories must be proofread, edited, and formatted correctly.
Using readily available free tools like spellcheck and Grammarly, it should be easy to check your work for grammar missteps, spelling mistakes, and typos. We also ask that you use Medium’s style tools to format your piece with web and mobile readers, for example, no excessively long blocks of unbroken text. If you have questions about polishing your articles and formatting them well, feel free to join our editorial feedback channel. We’ll be glad to help.
If you are a new writer just getting your feet wet with the platform…take a look at our welcome letter and this step-by-step guide, How to Write for Invisible Illness.
Note: Due to the large number of Invisible Illness applications, and the limited number of editorial human hours we have to respond, if you don’t hear back to us within a week of applying to write, please assume we’ve passed.
We can’t wait to read your next story,
