How to get published in the Manipal Medium publication
One-stop place to get yourself published
Manipal’s platform on Medium. A community for Bloggers.
For the students studying in Manipal spanning across the world.
Here’s what all this means for you as a writer:
- We won’t plaster your story with advertisements, or put it behind a paywall (or “email wall” or anything — no weird tricks).
- You can include links to your own blog or service, and even affiliate links, as long as it’s done tastefully and transparently.
- Your stories are yours. We don’t lay any claim to them. You can cross-post them wherever you want. Other newspapers and websites may even approach you about syndicating them or translating them. That’s fine with us. We just ask that — since we invest a lot of time in editing and promoting your stories — you don’t remove them from our Medium publication once we’ve published them.
Our editors have experience running and editing technical publications. We’ll read your submission, and if we think it’s promising, we’ll give you candid feedback as to how you can improve it. Then we’ll perform final editing on your story, publish it, then help you publicize it.
We seek to only publish stories that are:
- well written
- about interesting topics that people haven’t already written about too much on this platform.
- relevant to our audience, i.e. Manipal.
If we think your story is a good fit, we’ll add you as a writer to the Manipal publication and send you an acceptance letter with further instructions.
As a writer, you fight a war against indifference. You have to get people to care enough to click through to your story. You have to convince them to take a chance on you.
You have only two weapons against the relentless scroll of news feeds: a headline and an image.
Here’s what a story looks like in Medium’s news feed:
Here’s what it looks like on Facebook:
And here’s what it looks like on Twitter:
Your headline and opening image are the only things people have to judge your story on. Before they can even read your story’s first paragraph, they must answer a question. It’s the same question that we all ask ourselves every day: is this going to be worth my time?
Your first job as a writer is to choose a headline and image that will make people answer “yes.”
A good headline makes all the difference
Your headline is the most important part of your story. Spend time refining it.
Don’t use click-bait: “You won’t believe this one ridiculously effective headline dark pattern”
Don’t use listicles: “11 outrageous headlines that will compel people to read your Medium story”
Do tell the truth: “Clever but matter-of-fact headline about an interesting topic”
How long should your headline be? Hub-spot analyzed 6,000 blog posts and found that stories with 8 to 14-word headlines get more social media shares.
This said, make sure your headline is 80 characters or fewer. Otherwise, the title will get truncated in news feeds when people share your article on Facebook and Twitter.
Another consideration is how emotional a headline is. The more emotional (positive or negative) a headline is, the more likely people will click it.
Here’s a tool that helps you balance the length and sentiment of your headlines.
Headlines are traditionally written in “title case.” The Associated Press says to “capitalize the first letter of every word except articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of three letters or fewer.”
On Medium, I often throw title case out the window and just write headlines like a normal sentence. I even include punctuation as necessary. This format is more conversational, and easier to read.
Don’t break stories into parts. Labels like “part 1” scare people off, because who knows when you’ll get around to writing part 2. And if people encounter “part 2” and they haven’t read part 1, there’s a good chance they just won’t bother reading either. So it’s much better to just publish a single in-depth story.
Arrest with images
The second most important aspect of your story is its featured image.
Medium will automatically make the first image in your article its featured image. This means your article’s og-image meta property will be this image. This image will serve as your story’s ambassador everywhere: social media news feeds, Reddit, Google News — even RSS readers.
You can manually force Medium to treat a specific image as your article’s featured image. While in edit mode, click the image, then:
- Mac: ⌘ + Opt + 8
- PC: Ctrl + Alt + 8
Start considering images early in the writing process. And never publish without at least one image. Otherwise your story will be all but invisible in news feeds.
You should break up long stories with images. To paraphrase Mary Poppins, a spoonful of images helps the text go down.
Medium offers four different image widths. Note that these will all look the same on mobile.
Most of the time, you’ll want to stick with column width:
If you have a chart that is hard to read when it’s small, go bigger:
And if you’re really proud of an image, or if it’s chock full of interesting data, go full-bleed:
… and then there’s side straddle. Don’t use this size at all, because it makes the text less comfortable to read.
It’s also awkward when you’re done talking about the photo and your text is still pushed to the side.
Yeah. I’m still stuck over here.
Always include a high-resolution image at the top of a story under your headline. This has the following benefits:
- When people share your story on Facebook and Twitter, it will be more prominent in news feeds, making people more likely to click on it.
- It will look better in Medium’s own news feeds.
- Humans are visual creatures, and click on images.
Build momentum with a strong lead
Once your reader clicks through to your story, the trial begins. They’re looking for any excuse to jump back to their news feed. Reading requires a lot more effort than scrolling through cat photos.
Don’t waste time with intros or updates like “This was published on my blog at [blog URL]” or “Update: this has been posted on Hacker News.” You can put these things at the bottom of your story.
Instead, start making points and telling your story immediately.
Establish credibility
Figure out a way to establish your credibility within the first few paragraphs. If you’re a top expert in your field, say so. Don’t assume that people are going to take the time to google you.
“Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Any achievement or distinction that makes people take you more seriously will help give your readers the impression that “this person knows what they’re talking about.”
Reinforce your credibility throughout your story. Support your arguments with data. Use inline links to (non-pay-walled) research.
Write smart
Good writing is hard. Like any skill, it takes practice. There are no shortcuts to becoming a strong writer.
Do yourself a favor: write what you know.
Have you ever heard the term “writers block?” Writer’s block happens when you don’t know enough about a topic to write about it.
If you have trouble coming up with at least 5 minutes worth of things to say on a topic — or if your story devolves into a list of bullet points — you don’t know enough about it.
The antidote is research. Learning. Going out into the field.
Don’t publish anything you’re not proud of.
Attribute your sources
Technically as a writer, you’re liable for copyright infringement, and Medium is not. The simplest way to attribute an image is to put the words “Image credit” below an image, and link this text to its original source.
If you’re looking for images you can safely use without permission, check out Pexels, Unsplash, or search Google for images labeled for re-use.
Plagiarism — misrepresenting someone else’s writing as your own — is a serious offense in college, and it’s just as serious on Medium. Always attribute quotes to the people who originally said them. If it’s a multi-line quote, you should use Medium’s pull quotes:
“When you have wit of your own, it’s a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.”
― Criss Jami
You should only use Medium’s pull quotes as a way to highlight actual quotes — not to style your own text.
Add 5 tags
Medium allows you to add up to five tags to your story. Use them.
People follow specific topics on Medium. The most popular ones are #tech, #life-lessons, #travel, #design, and #startup.
People who follow the tags you use may see your story in their news feed. Tags also make it easier for people to stumble upon your story in search results.
Publicize your stories on social media
You can share your story on Twitter, Facebook groups, and relevant Subreddits. If you have a following, you can blast it out to your followers, too.
You can view your story’s stats in real time. Ask for feedback from your friends and followers. Incorporate this feedback into your story.
Don’t do anything sketchy to promote your story.
You will most likely be caught.
Final advice
Remember that when you publish on Medium, you’re asking thousands of people to give you several minutes of their lives. Don’t take your readers for granted.
Before you publish a story, I recommend you sleep, wake up, then proof-read it again.
We’re looking forward to reading your submissions. I hope we can help you further improve your stories, and reach a much wider audience.
Here’s how to submit your story to the Medium publication :
Send an email to manipal at asia dot com (manipal@asia.com)
Include the URL for your story on Medium (preferably an unpublished draft) and the word “ Miraculin” so that we’ll know that you have read all this
Only send one story URL per email. There’s no need to add anything further to your email — we just read the stories and judge them based on their own merits.
The author gives all credits to Quincy Larson and freeCodeCamp.org. Most if not all sources were taken from their original “how-to” article.
