New Writer Information
Must-Read for Japonica Writers
An orientation guide to optimize your articles for Japonica and Medium
Welcome to Japonica!
This article is an orientation guide to help you optimize your articles for Japonica and the Medium platform.
New to Medium?
If you are new to Medium, please check out the official Medium Creator’s Hub run by the Medium team.
★★ The Medium Starter Pack has all the useful resources in one place! ★★
Key to Success #1: Create an Arresting Headline
Writing for Japonica not only gets your article in front of a dedicated group of Japonica readers, but the millions of subscribers to Medium.
Thousands of articles are posted on Medium every day. You need a good headline to stand out and get readers to click on your story.
- Your headline (title) is the most important part of the story. Why should someone click on your article? What’s in it for the reader?
- Avoid “clickbait”. A good title generates curiosity, and the reader feels like the time reading it was well spent. A bad title will be branded as clickbait if the content was not what the title promised.
Key to Success #2: Follow Medium’s Formatting Conventions
Medium readers expect the articles to follow a specific format that’s a bit unique to Medium.
- Include a title and subtitle at the top. Please check Medium’s editing tools to format correctly.
- Include an image directly under the subtitle. The image should be attractive and relevant to your story. It must also be copyright-free. The easiest option is to use the Medium button to add an image from Unsplash. You can also use your own images. Images copied without permission are not allowed. All images must have a caption with copyright attribution. Please refer to Japonica’s image policy for details.
- Use plenty of white space. As many readers read on mobile devices, plenty of white space helps to improve the reading experience. Try to keep your paragraphs short to avoid a “wall of text.” Short paragraphs of 1–2 sentences are best.
- Use section breaks and sub-headers. Section breaks and sub-headers help to break up your text into digestible sections.
- Use links to reference your sources.
- Use preview blocks to highlight material on other sites. To add a block with a preview of another article, tweet, YouTube video, or anything else you want to emphasize, create a new line, paste the link, and hit return. Medium will automatically create a preview block.
Key to Success #3: Pick Good Tags
When you submit to the publication, you’ll be asked to select up to 5 tags. These are not keywords. These are topics.
When people sign up for Medium, they select “topics” they’re interested in. When you read articles, Medium adds those topics to your interest list.
When you post an article, it gets displayed in the feed of people interested in the selected topics. You should pick broad topics with a large readership, but specific enough that your article will be interesting to them.
For example, if you write an article about junmai sake, “junmai” might be a good keyword, but it’s useless as a topic tag. Good tags would be “Japanese culture”, “Japanese food”, “food & drink”, and perhaps “wine”.
These are usually good topic tags for articles submitted to Japonica:
- Japan
- Japanese
- Japanese Culture
- Japanese Language
- 日本語 — for articles written in Japanese. Unfortunately, articles written in Japanese won’t be distributed by Medium as the curators can only review articles in English (as of now). Your stories written in Japanese can still be promoted by Japonica on our social media accounts.
Combine these Japan-specific tags with broader tags with larger audiences to help you reach a broader base of readers.
Key to Success #4: Understanding How Articles are Promoted
One of the biggest advantages of writing on Japonica, as opposed to writing on your own website or blog is that you have access to a built-in audience and our promotion.
Distribution by Japonica
- When you write for Japonica, your articles will be distributed to Japonica followers as well as your own Medium followers.
- Japonica also promotes your article outside of Medium on social media, especially Twitter and LinkedIn. Please join the conversation about your article.
- You should share your articles on your social media accounts.
Distribution by Medium
- Medium has an automatic distribution system based on tags.
- Medium also has a curation system. If your article is selected, it may be distributed to a larger Medium audience via the feed recommendations and digest e-mails.
Key to Success #5: Join the Japonica Community
- Follow Japonica and other Japonica writers on Medium. Clap for their stories. Add comments.
- Follow Japonica and other Japonica on Twitter and/or LinkedIn. Share, retweet, like, reply with comments. Each story is the beginning of a conversation. The more you join in with other writers’ articles, the more they’ll help promote yours.
Make Money as a Writer
- Once you reach 100 followers, you can sign up for Medium’s partner program where you get paid for your articles based on reading time by subscribers. You also get paid for referring new subscribers.
- The best way to get your own followers is to regularly write great articles. But it also helps immensely if you follow other writers and join in the discussion.
Medium Policies
At Medium, and Japonica, you are the owner of your work.
However, Medium does have rules, and if you are found to be in violation of them, could lead to suspension from the platform. We value every writer and don’t wish to see this happen to you, so we ask that you take some time to go through the official rules from Medium.
Reposted Content
- Medium allows the reposting of your own content from another non-Medium blog. You can either directly import your stories or manually set canonical links.
- Medium does not allow you to duplicate or repost the same article within Medium. This is against Medium policy as it conflicts with the Medium distribution system.
Plagiarism
Don’t do it. You will be suspended from Medium if you are found to have plagiarized work.
Ready to Submit Your First Article?
For a step-by-step guide to submitting your first article to Japonica, click here.
