Moments — Publication Updates
The redesign, re-opening submissions, and more…
What are the important moments of life? What really matters? What drives us, what moves us — what makes us feel like we’re bursting with robust passion and overflowing the all of the vibrant feelings of life? Stories that reflect the answer to those questions are what this publication is all about.
This publication tries to isolate the snapshots of passionate moments that happen to us throughout our lives, assembling those moments from people from widely different backgrounds to unite us under the banner of the shared human condition.
What makes us feel alive? These are the feelings we all share and they make life worth living. On top of just filling you in on the updates to the publication, here, I’m going to give a little bit of practical advice and some Medium guidelines that people surprisingly miss often.
The Moments Makeover
If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed an update — Moments of Passion is now just Moments — it’s gotten a makeover, one that’s been long overdue.
I’ve also changed the face of the landing page for the publication, featuring certain articles and changing the chronology that people see stories. I’ll be changing this up to give more stories exposure going forward.
I’ve long wanted to shorten the title and make it a bit more concise. And along with visual changes, I will be reopening the publication for submissions.
Open for Submissions
You read that right, I’ll be reopening the publication for submissions again.
Going forward, I’d like to see the publication take shape and forge a uniform voice. I’ve started to move philosophical and political posts — passionate as we may be about them — over to Flux, a publication which can be found here.
As far as images go, I support you using your own images. But make sure to keep them professional. I’m going to be getting more stringent on what gets published.
Some issues I’ve seen with writers that will be cause for rejection going forward….
Overuse of Formatting
I get a lot of pieces that come our way that are formatted to the point of illegibility. Try to avoid double spaces between single sentences all the way down. I know everyone tells you to do it this way and it has its time and place, but I get a lot of submissions that are like this all the way down.
Your story shouldn’t be like this.
And then there will be a space before another sentence.
And then an additional space before a third.
All the way down the page.
There’s nothing wrong with paragraphs, they cluster together ideas and keep the story flowing for the reader.
Similarly, you shouldn’t want to add different kinds of formatting into every single piece. I’ve seen six or more large pull quotes put into the same story, alongside a lot of italicized font and bolded font that interrupted the stream of the story, leading to constant confusion about what these cues mean and how they’re to be interpreted by the reader. Try not to overuse these.
Take a look at a story from The Atlantic or other major publications for examples of how to assemble together the parts of your stories while still giving the piece breathing room so the reader isn’t overwhelmed.
It’s okay to space things out and use formatting to highlight select parts of your article, but you don’t want to use it in every section, or else it loses its punch and emphasis. Jessica Valenti is a writer on Medium who’s a master at this.
Try to make it look more like a professional piece that you’d see in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other big named media outlets. Don’t just do this for me, good formatting goes a long way with readers, too.
Title Disqualifications
From Medium themselves, the following are title disqualifications when it comes to further distribution…
- Clickbait is content that’s designed to entice a reader to click. It often shows up in the form of deceptive or manipulative story packaging (the headline, subheadline, and feature image) — a hyperbolic claim, a too-wide curiosity gap, a titillating image, etc. These stories do not follow through on their promise and often leave the reader unsatisfied.
- No headline
- All-caps headline
- Typos in headline
- Links in headline
- No profanity (exceptions for demonstrable necessity)
- No clickbait
You can read more about what will disqualify you from distribution here and it’s safe to say, Moments will be following the Medium guidelines when it comes to distribution standards.
Indescriptive or too Abstract Titles
This is another big one. A lot of submissions I get have extremely generic titles. Try to put your potential reader into the mindset of what’s happening. It’s rare that one-word titles are absolute winners. I also suggest following the subject-verb-object agreement that the basic English sentences have.
Instead of naming your story just My Love, try telling your reader what your love did. But My Love That’s Carried Me Through This Wild Life sounds a lot more interesting. The love did something, it paints more of a complete picture with an object in the mix, it helps the reader who’s glancing at your piece and deciding whether or not to click on it to envision it a bit.
I recently published a story on constructing the perfect title and how I go about my process of doing so. Here it is for those who are interested:
Aim for Distribution
Contrary to what some people are running around saying, distribution (formerly curation) is still a big deal. You want to be curated if possible and that requires fine-tuning your stories until they become the best pieces they can be.
After all, we aren’t writing to not be seen, right? So it logically follows that we want to have our stories that we’ve worked so hard on to show up in as many feeds as possible.
In Closing
We’ve tried to be as forgiving as possible when it comes to working with you. But we also keep seeing the same mistakes over and over again and it takes up a lot of our time when we have to work with writers to help them construct the perfect piece. We’re glad to do it, but please take note and try to do better the next time.
A lot of people have been shaken by recent Medium changes but if we embrace them as an opportunity to grow and adapt, we’ll do fine. Many of us have been through a lot of these changes and we’re still here and doing well, aren’t we? We’ve adapted before and we’ll adapt again.
Happy writing and I look forward to hearing from you all.
Kind regards,
PS: Here are the submission guidelines in case you need them to refresh your memory:
