Submission Guidelines & Policies for Plethora of Pop — Updated on August 17, 2024
Easy rules, guidelines, etc. for stories here
NOTE: Effective immediately, as of August 18, 2024, Plethora of Pop is putting a temporary pause on adding any new writers to the publication. We will resume adding new writers sometime in early 2025. If you’re interested in writing for us, I thank you very much for your interest and I hope you’ll consider checking back with us then.
Rules, Guidelines, And Other Bossy-Sounding Stuff
First of all, if you don’t know them already, please read and follow Medium’s general rules.
The following are our main policies/rules/whatever-you-want-to-call-them for Plethora of Pop:
1. Please keep cursing to a minimum
I’m not a prude, but I’m generally not a fan of cursing — especially in what is supposed to be a fun forum to talk about things like music, television, books, and movies. I like the idea of people of all ages, including children, being able to come here and read things that they aren’t offended by because of excessive cursing.
However, since sometimes curse words suit the material that is being written about, I’m dropping our “no cursing” policy. Instead, I’m now asking writers to try to keep the cursing in their submissions to a minimum.
2. No politics, controversial topics, or “heated rants” here
There are plenty of places to talk about politics, religion, etc. on Medium, but this publication about pop culture is not one of them.
3. Write about things that you like — not about things that you despise
I’m not saying that writers can’t make statements about music, movies, and television shows they dislike or that they wish had been better, but I don’t want Plethora of Pop to be a place where writers go off on mean-spirited rants about things that they completely hate.
Articles with titles like 100 Reasons The Star Wars Sequels Were The Worst Pieces Of Garbage In The History Of Movies or Justin Beiber’s Music Sucks And This Is Why I Think He Should Be Thrown In A Dumpster are not the kinds of things I want here.
4. Please keep your stories to no longer than 8 minutes long in terms of their reading times
5. Please submit no more than three stories per week — but not on consecutive days
While we’re very flattered when writers want to share multiple works here, we like to ‘split things up’ a bit with what we publish. In addition to our request to submit no more than three stories per week, we also ask that you space them out to at least every other day.
6. Absolutely NO AI-generated stories
Plethora of Pop’s rule regarding AI-generated stories is very simple: We do not want them here.
While AI can be a wonderful thing in some ways, I want only human storytelling here.
If we feel that a story submission is written with AI, we have multiple resources we will use to check the human authenticity of the story. If those resources tell us that the story was AI-generated, it will be rejected from the publication. On a very related note, if a writer repeatedly submits AI-generated stories to us after they have been rejected, they will be removed from the publication.
As for AI-generated images, which seem to be getting more and more popular on Medium, we will allow the usage of them in stories submitted here — but they must be credited as having been created with AI.
7. Please Avoid Spoilers in Posts About Movies, Books, and TV Series!
Please refrain from sharing too much information about the plots of movies, books, and television series you write about here.
For me, as an avid fan of fictional stories, I love to be surprised by everything that happens within the stories I’m reading or watching. Too many ‘spoilers’ can ruin (or at least seriously dampen) the stories I’m reading or watching.
I know most other people feel the same way, so I ask that stories and reviews about fictional stories here be spoiler-free.
‘Spoiler Warnings’ do NOT nullify the above rule, so please do not use them here as a way to still be able to share important/crucial information about the stories you’re writing about.
A good general rule to follow regarding all of this is to include no more info in your post than readers would see in book blurbs from publishers, or that TV and movie watchers would see in trailers/previews from production companies.
8. We will no longer publish stories that have previously been published on Medium — even if they weren’t in a publication
The main reason for this is because when previously published stories are submitted here as drafts and we then publish them, they still retain the original publication date. They then get auto-sorted by Medium among other stories that were published around the same time as the original publication date, rather than appear on our main page as a new story.
In this regard, it’s not very beneficial for a writer to republish their older stories with us, since they would get sort of ‘lost’ here among older stories.
9. The editors here may need to communicate with you about your stories at times, so please make sure you have private notes turned on and you are set up to receive notifications for notes.
10. Keep it light and keep it fun!
It’s a place about pop culture, folks.
Let’s enjoy ourselves with it all!
Some Other Very Important Things
About Titles and Subtitles for Stories
Please use Title Case for your main titles and Sentence Case for your subtitles and also use APA style for how you capitalize them. If you’re unsure of how to do that, the below site is a VERY handy resource. I use it very frequently.
Please Use Subtitles Beneath Your Main Titles
There’s not much more to add here to this one. Titles are fantastic (catchy ones are especially fantastic) but they’re made even better by also using subtitles.
To learn the best ways to format the sizes and styles of titles, subtitles, and kickers (an optional thing), please check out this great post:
About Images
Please include some sort of image at the top of your stories and give credit to wherever it came from — even if it’s your own image.
Please follow that rule for ALL images you include in your submissions. It’s not just our rule — it’s also Medium’s rule.
The Types of Images That Are Not Allowed Here
Please do not use images from image-sharing sites such as Instagram and Pinterest.
Also, please do not use images from the websites of popular (or unpopular) magazines or newspapers — or from professional photography sources such as Getty Images.
About Images From Album Covers, Book Covers, Movies, and Television Series
Since all submissions to Plethora of Pop should be about either music, movies, books, or television, it’s very common for writers here to use images of album covers, book covers, and scenes from movies and TV series.
Even though those sorts of images usually fall under ‘fair use’ rules online, it’s still VERY IMPORTANT for those images to be properly credited.
It’s very easy, though. If you’re using an album cover, please credit the record label it was released on. If it’s a movie or TV series, please credit the production studios who created them or currently own the rights to them. If it’s a book, please credit the publisher.
A couple of examples:
VERY IMPORTANT RULE HERE: Do NOT include any images with nudity or depictions of violence in them.
About Song Lyrics
Because of potential copyright issues regarding the usages of quoted song lyrics, Plethora of Pop will no longer publish any stories that contain song lyrics.
To learn more about our reasons for this, please read the following:
Please take the time to make sure your stories are free of spelling and grammatical errors before you submit them here.
The other editors or I may edit and fix grammatical mistakes we find as we’re editing submissions. However, even though Medium refers to publication owners as “editors,” I honestly don’t want to have to spend a lot of time editing pieces by other writers — so please have your submissions in great shape before you submit them here.
You can add up to five topics (also known as tags) to your stories. You do not have to use Plethora of Pop as one of them, but I ask that at least one of your topics be one of these: Music, Television, Movies, Books, or Pop Life.
Topics need to be at least one of those five words/phrases in order for Medium to “auto-sort” them into the Music, Television, Movies, Books, or Pop Life sections of the publication.
If more than one of those topics applies to your story, then go ahead and use however many of them as you’d like.
(NOTE: To learn more about the recently added Pop Life category, click here.)
A VERY IMPORTANT THING TO KNOW — OUR HOURS OF OPERATION
Plethora of Pop’s editors work no later than 5 PM Eastern (New York) Time on weekdays.
Also, they have off on weekends and will not look at story submissions on Saturdays and Sundays.
If you submit stories to us on weekends, the earliest your submissions will be looked at is on the following Monday. Please keep that in mind if you submit on Saturdays or Sundays.
Although we try our best to look at submissions as quickly as we can, it may sometimes take us up to 48 hours to look at them.
And that’s it!
Best wishes,
Buddy Gott, Founder and Chief Editor of Plethora of Pop
P.S. — If you’d like to reach out to me with any questions or comments, please do so. My email address is buddygottwrites@gmail.com.
