Submission Guidelines
What we’re eager to publish, plus best practices
--
The Mission reaches millions of the smartest readers in the world each month. Our social followers are at 475k and growing, and we publish a weekly and a daily newsletter that reaches 180k+ subscribers.
We strive to publish as many evergreen stories as possible. We want to publish stories that will matter today, next year, and if we’re lucky… for decades. This pursuit forces us to have strict editorial standards for the submissions we accept. We receive a large number of inquiries and submissions, and will only consider those that fit the criteria below.
Align With Our Themes
Each story must align with one or more of our themes. Our themes include: accelerated learning, startups, technology, health, science, art, design, and how to build a better future. We love promoting uplifting stories about the individuals and teams lifting humanity and creating a better world.
Tell a Story
Each submission should include a story, no matter how brief, to draw the readers into your story. We’re looking to publish stories between 750–3,000 words. The types and format of stories we publish include: Op-Ed’s, in depth how-to pieces, interesting musings, high quality listicles, journalistic works of art, narrative nonfiction, near-term speculative fiction, historical fiction, and fascinating interviews.
Here are some of examples of the type of stories we’re looking for:
Build Your Reputation, But Don’t be Afraid to Destroy it And Become Notorious
How to Gamify Your Life to Quickly Accomplish Big Goals
Rocket AI: The Most Notorious AI Launch and the Problem with AI Hype
The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen
The Woman Who Everyone Laughed At
Steve Jobs & Dan Kottke’s “Spirit Bookshelf”
Humanity’s Extinction Event is Coming
The Miracles of Mathematics Will Make Your World More Vibrant
Side note: To get stories like the one’s above delivered to your inbox on M-F, plus updates and other goodies, you can subscribe to our newsletter here.
Entertain & Educate
Each story should try to tie into an important topic (whether its importance was lost in the past, exists now, or will be vital in the future). Our stories seek to explore, entertain, and spark conversation around rapidly emerging technologies and issues. We’re looking for strong opinions, weakly held.
Architecturally, Stylistically, and Visually Appealing
For the philosophy nerds out there, we want each of our stories to reach for the three-tiered platonic cannon: the good, the true, and the beautiful. We’re looking for stories which have been carefully structured, and edited for grammar, spelling, readability, and cohesiveness. We suggest that writers get help from places like Hemingway App, Grammarly, and friends who can provide critical feedback (prior to submitting your piece!).
All submissions should have a featured image above or below the title. Our favorite stock photo site is Twenty20! Bonus points for articles with beautiful, rich media (video, data, charts, or even GIFs) throughout the story. All images must be owned by you or include a cited source. We retain the right to remove images from submissions and replace them with those our editors pick.
Please use Medium’s formatting features! Headers, quotes, italics, etc.. A careful use of formatting is what helps make an article easy to read and share.
The Topics We’re Interested in Covering
- Technology and Science — Startups, software, hardware, apps, VR/AR/MR, the IOT, machine learning, engineering, robotics, nanotechnology, bio-engineering, material science, and breakthrough technologies that are helping abundance become ubiquitous
- Explorations — Personal challenges, tragedies, triumphs, and travels, emerging physical and mental trials, new sports, innovative types of entertainment and art, seafaring, spacefaring, along with asteroid identification and mining
- Improving the Human Condition — Rebuilding our crumbling culture, developing the developed world, optimizing ourselves, promoting empathy and love, health and longevity, personal mastery of our bodies & biome, neuroscience, helping politics and systems of cooperation evolve, and promoting voluntary evolution
Things to Remember
Please Only Submit Unpublished Drafts
In the spirit of trying to get your article the most exposure possible, we prefer unpublished drafts over published stories. Medium’s algorithm favors fresh stories, and our homepage is sorted by date of when the article was published (not when it was accepted into the publication). The longer it’s been since a story’s original publish date, the poorer it will usually perform.
We Reserve the Right to Alter and Edit Your Story
The Mission team can edit the content of your story if grammatical errors are found, along with adding logos, bylines, ads, images, etc. to your story. If you remove this content after your story is published, it will be removed from The Mission, and you will be removed from our list of contributors.
We’re Looking For Long-Term Relationships
Once we’ve published your story on The Mission, we ask that it remain in our publication. We will not be accepting articles from writers who publish with The Mission and then publish the same stories elsewhere on Medium.
We will only publish author bylines that are 1–2 sentences long. Please feel free to include 1–2 links. Anything longer will be removed (including author photos, newsletter forms, excessive links, etc). These shorter bylines and a single sentence CTA to recommend and share will help increase the amount of people your story reaches.
Response Time
Our response time varies, but we’re usually pretty quick. If you haven’t heard back about a submission within 48 hours, please assume it won’t be published.
To have your submission considered, please fill out this form. If your story aligns with The Mission’s themes, we’ll be in touch soon.
We’re looking forward to your submission!
