Inviting Top Writers to “ILLUMINATION-Curated”
Tags: Self Improvement, Philosophy, Science, Business, Writing

Invitation to Top Writers — Create Visibility

Inviting Top Writers to “ILLUMINATION-Curated”

Give a second life to your curated and outstanding stories

Photo by Fabio Jock on Unsplash

Both ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated support many top writers. Our aim is to create multiple visibility options for them, and the demand from writers to submit their outstanding stories to ILLUMINATION-Curated is rapidly increasing.

The value ILLUMINATION-Curated adds to our top writers and advanced readers is recognized, and our stats substantiate this claim.

Here is the diagram depicting new visitors to ILLUMINATION-Curated.

The Major Goal of ILLUMINATION-Curated

We analyzed the feedback from our customers — our readers and writers — and created an innovative publication design for ILLUMINATION-Curated. This design will help us reach our goal of offering high-quality content to our readers, while simultaneously allowing us to meet the needs and aspirations of our top writers.

The Process for ILLUMINATION-Curated

We established a process to publish stories in this publication.

There are three ways for articles to be included in ILLUMINATION-Curated.

1 — The first one is for Medium-curated articles published in ILLUMINATION. Our writers can remove their articles and add them to ILLUMINATION-Curated. We also give our writers the flexibility to move their articles back to ILLUMINATION, if they so choose.

2 — The second option is related to articles published in ILLUMINATION but not curated by Medium. If these non-curated articles meet our submission guidelines and Medium curation guidelines, they can be selected by our editors using a set of criteria. The editors approve the article for publication in ILLUMINATION-Curated and inform the writer. The writers can then transfer their article from ILLUMINATION to ILLUMINATION-Curated. Writers will need to request access to the new publication.

3 — The third option is the direct submission by approved writers for ILLUMINATION-Curated, meeting all submission guidelines and approved by our editors. We have already selected over 100 top writers as part of this pilot implementation, and we are eager to extend our offering to more writers.

The Value for Writers of ILLUMINATION

Though we invite advanced and accomplished writers with a demonstrated curation success rate on Medium to write for ILLUMINATION, we also support writers at several levels.

Our aim is to give meaningful and realistic goals to our writers, for the purpose of elevating the skills of our writers at all levels. For example, as part of our pilot project, aspiring writers can make a commitment to follow Medium curation guidelines and improve the quality of their stories for a promotion to write in our new publication.

This new publication is a tool to encourage our writers to grow. Cross-pollinating writers at all levels is a primary purpose of ILLUMINATION, and we are committed to featuring our writers and putting their outstanding stories to spotlight.

Value for Top Writers

ILLUMINATION-Curated is home for high quality and outstanding stories aiming towards giving the best reading experience to our advanced readers.

We only publish articulated and edited content with a clear purpose.The stories of Top Writers have the potential to find a new audience, because we are promoting this publication to readers who enjoy reading high-quality articles with important content for society.

ILLUMINATION-Curated aims to bring Top Writers under an umbrella and encourage collaboration among them, having writers support writers because they know the challenges they face. As a bonus, networking with top writers from different backgrounds can increase synergy and create serendipity.

For ILLUMINATION-Curated, we set the benchmark and raise the bar for producing and sharing quality content in over 100 topics.

Stories submitted to ILLUMINATION-Curated must adhere to Medium curation guidelines at a minimum to qualify the contributors as permanent writers for this publication.

We understand the challenges of the curation process on Medium. Even the most experienced Top Writers feel the pain of rejection. This pain is a natural consequence of subjective assessment.

We discovered that even if many Top Writers religiously followed the guidelines, their stories still might not be curated by Medium. The Medium curation guideline clearly states that the curation process is subjective and we acknowledge this fact. We also understand this constraint undermines the quality stories submitted by Top Writers, if not curated.

We came across remarkable stories not distributed to topics.

With this insight in mind, editors of ILLUMINATION-Curated are determined to evaluate articulated and outstanding stories by using our rigorous and objective process, leveraging Medium curation guidelines. If these outstanding stories match the set of criteria, even if we disagree with the content, we still qualify them for ILLUMINATION-Curated.

We know that each reader is unique. We respect the choice of our readers and do our best to meet their expectations. Undoubtedly, one person’s rejection could be another person’s curation as far as content is concerned. This is why impartiality for content is one of the core values of ILLUMINATION-Curated editors.

ILLUMINATION-Curated aims to provide high-quality and high-impact content to our esteemed readers, representing a wide variety of domains.

We discovered that some readers of ILLUMINATION preferred only content written in simple language that appeals to a broad audience at all levels. However, the primary goal of ILLUMINATION-Curated is to cater to a more specific audience which prefers sophisticated language and complex topics, as is reflected by the feedback during this pilot initiative.

ILLUMINATION-Curated adds exceptional value to Top Writers. For example, we not only select high-quality articles, but we also edit them to meet the requirements of our readers.

Editing is an added value we provide to our writers and readers, but editing is an expensive process. However, our experienced editors are willing to perform this duty, free of charge as a giveback activity to the writer and reader communities.

These editors are not paid by the writers, the publication, or Medium. These editors only do this for altruistic and intellectual purposes, and we are privileged to have a team of volunteers performing the editing function for the success of our writers.

ILLUMINATION-Curated has 38 volunteering editors who can read and vote for stories to curate them for a specific audience looking for a quality reading experience. Our plan is to increase the number of editors to 100. These diligent and committed editors are also willing to undertake the role of curators for the new publication.

Providing edited and curated stories to our reader is an innovative solution and can be considered a paradigm shift for publication services on Medium. This reflects the power of collaboration.

Benefits for Older Curated Stories

For instance, if our writers submit curated articles to ILLUMINATION-Curated, their older Medium-curated stories can also be curated by ILLUMINATION. We call this “dual curation”.

We offer flexibility for the success of our writers, so even though we recommend draft submissions, as a bonus, we created an exception for older curated articles to be submitted as published.

This means that if writers have published articles, previously curated by Medium, these writers can still submit those older articles. We value articles chosen by the Medium curation process.

The purpose of ILLUMINATION-Curated is to give a second life to curated stories.

Why is dual curation important for top writers?

Dual curation can bring two significant benefits for increased visibility.

As you may know, Medium supports curated stories by several means. ILLUMINATION-Curated uses the same model but plans to extend the model with targeted distribution and innovative means as explained in next section.

In addition to Medium curation, how does ILLUMINATION curation help the Top Writers?

We offer three benefits.

1 — The first reason is our curation process does not depend on algorithms. Our human editors perform selection activities.

2 — Secondly, our curation process is based on the agreed criteria. We use the level of rigor that peer-reviewed journals perform.

3 — Thirdly, and most importantly, is that we simply have more human eyes going over your outstanding articles for reading and editing. And in many cases there are several editors communicating and collaborating with the writers and with each other, to help bring out the best in your articles.

ILLUMINATION-Curated editors will use the Medium curation guidelines along with a set of criteria, standardized by ILLUMINATION editors, to determine whether a piece can be curated or not.

Our hands-on approach aims to address the root causes of the concerns that Top Writers experience now and then. Many of us experienced the suffering from rejections.

With empathy and compassion for accomplished writers, our goal is to reduce the potential pain as much as possible. We designed an innovative process, clear procedures, and productive tools to achieve this goal.

ILLUMINATION-Curated editors believe that writers need a certain amount of objectivity for selection of their content for distribution to a broader audience. Our core values, such as diversity, inclusiveness, and fairness, require us to remain on the more objective side. ILLUMINATION-Curated is a value-driven publication. We don’t compromise our values.

Strategies, tactics, and techniques tend to change, but the values of our publications will not change. They are permanent and designed to survive and thrive in our exciting journey.

Innovation Brings Several Other Benefits

For example, if ILLUMINATION editors/curators choose stories of Top Writers and publish them in our new platform, these stories are more likely to be curated by Medium due to the editing and formatting rigor that we invest in these stories.

We also introduce a consolation for rejected stories caused by too much subjectivity.

If Medium does not curate outstanding stories, we believe that subjectivity has affected the outcome. But, as Top Writers of ILLUMINATION-Curated, at least your high-quality and high-impact articles will be curated and distributed to a target group. The consolation is to relieve the pain of rejection by at least half.

Editors of ILLUMINATION-Curated are working hard to increase the curation rate of our writers, developing many tools and processes that are helping our writers increase their number of curated stories.

Distribution Model

As you know, Medium distributes curated stories to readers on-topic pages, the Medium app, Daily Digest newsletter, emails, and sometimes on their front page.

ILLUMINATION-Curated will follow a similar model.

We extend the current model to amplify messages to a broader and targeted audience at the same time.

For example, stories published on ILLUMINATION-Curated are captured in a Flipboard magazine and distributed to our external readers.

In addition to automating our new publication to create Twitter posts of your stories, we also post your stories to our own FaceBook page.

We will pin your stories to Pinterest Board and also post them to Quora Spaces.

Our tech savvy leaders are automating to share stories to 600 external services using IFTTT tools, helping your stories to be indexed by various search engines.

Reader-focus

ILLUMINATION-Curated is a reader-focused publication and service excellence is our strategy.

Since establishing this publication, we communicate with the readers daily using various methods, including Slack groups, social media, email, newsletters, and voice communication tools.

We distribute our stories every day to serve our readers as a daily digest.

Readers enjoy our distribution lists, through which they can access many stories from a single article. Recently, we archived over 50,000 articles, easily accessible from a single story.

ILLUMINATION-Curated is designed to serve a special reader group with special reader expectations. These are characterized as discerning readers.

We understand that the audience of ILLUMINATION-Curated is not after simple tricks. For instance, this special reader group does not want to read stories about how much money Medium writers earn. They do not want to read about the issues encountered on social media platforms.

These readers want to enjoy the high-quality and high-impact materials which matter to them and to society.

The audience for ILLUMINATION-Curated includes professionals in business, science, technology, philosophy, arts, self-improvement and many other interesting domains.

Focus on Editing

Based on our daily interactions with thousands of readers, we know that advanced readers prefer curated stories edited by experienced editors.

We have experienced editors and utilize their capability as curators, choosing the optimal content for our readers.

Based on reader feedback, we know the expectations and requirements of our audience. We have accumulated rich and supportive data for our business strategies and tactics.

Editing is a primary focus of ILLUMINATION-Curated.

Progress

ILLUMINATION-Curated is operating in pilot mode, but the publication is ready to review, currently hosting many outstanding articles.

Many Top Writers have already joined and have submitted their stories.

ILLUMINATION-Curated currently has trending articles enjoyed by many readers, and our beta readers are providing constant feedback.

We received useful feedback from our beta readers and are continuously refining our process, procedures, and tools.

ILLUMINATION-Curated editors shared useful resources to guide our top writers and encourage our other writers who are working hard to elevate their skills.

For example:

This article by Tree Langdon is about the ILLUMINATION-Curated submission process.

This educative article by Dew Langrial aims to help our writers. Dew is mentoring many writers to achieve their curation goals. Her altruistic contributions are greatly appreciated.

This article by Britni Pepper reflects editor, writer, and reader for the value we add on ILLUMINATION-Curated.

Easy transfer between two publications

ILLUMINATION writers can easily move their curated stories between the two publications to receive the benefit of different audiences.

CLARIFICATION:

A story on Medium can be published in only one publication at a time. Therefore, you need to remove your curated story from ILLUMINATION and submit it to ILLUMINATION-Curated. Your story will be published and hosted on the new publication, and it should no longer be in the previous publication. There is no duplication. Your story is either on ILLUMINATION or on ILLUMINATION-Curated. Not in both of them at the same time. If you read comments contrary to this on social media, it is an allegation with no facts. ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated are 100% compliant with Medium rules.

Please check the step by step guide authored by our editor Dew Langrial.

If you are a current writer, we can add you to the new publication so that you can transfer your curated stories. Please send a request via this link.