Welcome to The Self-Experimenter!

Submission guidelines and more

Image Courtesy of the Author

Welcome to The Self-Experimenter, a publication made for those who like to experiment with different aspects of their lives.

We all like to find life-hacks to improve ourselves, from quitting caffeine, journalling, to taking cold showers every day for 30 days. Not everyone can keep a self-experiment going the whole way, but we sure like to hear about those who do!

The mission of this publication is to be the home for documentaries of personal experiments and challenges — in the pursuit of creating a better you.

An important note: this publication does NOT advocate dodgy health advice or other self-experiments that could put your life or the lives of others in danger. We’re not talking about crazy diet pills and that sort of ilk here.

What we’re interested in

• Detailed stories of your self-experiments. This includes why you started your experiment, what you were hoping to achieve, what you did, how you did it, and what the outcome was.
• Stories with hard data. If it’s appropriate, try to include some kind of data in your story — measurable experiments are the best sort. For experiments where metrics are a little ambiguous, say bullet journaling for 30 days, you could still track your moods or a slider of productivity levels.
• Research backing or defying. If your experiment was inspired by academic/scientific research and it either confirms or opposes that research, we’re totally interested in hearing about it.

Writing guidelines

• We only accept unpublished drafts. This is for your benefit as the story will appear on the front page when it’s published instead of being backdated and lost in the archives.
• Articles must be at least three minutes long. We want a bit of depth in your story.
• Titles must be title-case. If you are not sure how to capitalize your title, you can use a Title Case Converter.
• Please format your title and subtitle correctly using the big T and smaller T options like so:

Image Courtesy of the Author

Image Courtesy of the Author

• Please include a high-quality feature image below your title. This is easier than ever thanks to Medium’s partnership with Unsplash. Just click the little plus sign on the left side and then the magnifier icon to search the Unsplash database.
• Images MUST be credited, even if they’re your own, you can say “Image courtesy of the author”, “Image by Author”, or something along those lines.
• Please try to edit and proofread your stories before submitting them. There are tons of free spelling and grammar checking software out there. We recommend Grammarly, but there is also the Hemingway Editor and ProWritingAid.

What we’ll reject right away

• Stories of self-experiments that pose a danger to your health and others. We’re trying to find ways to improve our lives, not throw them away. We also don’t want people to be endangering themselves by copying you.
• Pieces with too many spelling or grammar mistakes.
• Plagiarism. Your experiments and results should be yours, not someone else's.
• Stories full of spam and CTA’s.
• Stories breaking Medium rules and guidelines.
• Stories promoting hate or discrimination of any kind, as well as unethical or inappropriate behavior.
• As well as threatening health — content that threatens, encourages, or incites violence against anyone, directly or indirectly.

As a publication, we reserve the right to edit and make minor changes to your story without notice.

This includes light touches on spelling, grammar, and formatting. If changes are more significant, you’ll get a friendly note of suggestions.

We do this to get the best possible chance of Medium curating your story (being chosen for further distribution), which improves its visibility across the platform.

Submitting your story

If you haven’t already been accepted as a writer for us, please submit via this form.

If you have been accepted as a writer, you can add your submission directly through Medium by clicking the three dots next to the ‘publish’ button, then ‘Add to publication’, and select ‘The Self-Experimenter’.

Please allow us up to 3 working days to initially respond to your submission (this includes writers already accepted). However, life does sometimes get in the way so if you’ve submitted and haven’t heard anything at all after then, send Alex an email at theselfexperimenterpub@gmail.com.