What Do You Need to Do to Write for Koinonia?
By: Mishael Witty
Tags: Koinonia, Publication, Writing, Submission Guidelines, Writing Tips

What is Koinonia?

Koinonia (pronounced coin-uh-KNEE-uh) is a Greek word meaning “Christian fellowship, sharing, partnership, and community.”

As a publication, we seek to build an online community of writers who love Jesus and want to join with Him in obedience to the Great Commission by sharing the Good News through our words.

What do we publish?

We publish high-quality stories following the guiding principle of Ephesians 4:29 (NIV):

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.

Stories should promote (or at least not hinder) readers’ mental, emotional, physical, and/or spiritual health. We will not publish anything that could be considered a rant against any individual and/or group of people, especially in the absence of any constructive takeaway message.

Stories should also fit into one of five categories (and should be tagged appropriately):

Christianity — We love to read about what God is teaching you. Share your Bible studies, reflections on biblical passages or sermon notes, personal testimonies, etc.

— We love to read about what God is teaching you. Share your Bible studies, reflections on biblical passages or sermon notes, personal testimonies, etc. Creativity — Tips or techniques, processes or products, ideas or inspiration… We are all creative beings created in the image of our Creator. Share your experiences with creativity…and/or the One from whom creativity comes.

— Tips or techniques, processes or products, ideas or inspiration… We are all creative beings created in the image of our Creator. Share your experiences with creativity…and/or the One from whom creativity comes. Health — What has God shown you about how to stay healthy — mentally, physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually? We’d love to read about it!

— What has God shown you about how to stay healthy — mentally, physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually? We’d love to read about it! Relationships —We all have relationships with other people (and with God). Share your stories on prayer (personal communication with the Father), friendship, love, marriage, parenting, interactions on the job, with your family of origin or your extended or adopted family…even your relationship with your pet could apply here. The possibilities are pretty much limitless.

—We all have relationships with other people (and with God). Share your stories on prayer (personal communication with the Father), friendship, love, marriage, parenting, interactions on the job, with your family of origin or your extended or adopted family…even your relationship with your pet could apply here. The possibilities are pretty much limitless. Writing Tips — If you’ve been writing for a while, you know what works. Work/life balance, productivity, polishing your prose till it sparkles… If you’ve got the answers to our questions, don’t keep them secret. Share!

We recommend that all our writers be paid Medium members, and we prefer stories that are behind Medium’s paywall. That helps us, as a publication, and you, as a writer, get wider visibility via potential curation and distribution.

This means more money for you if you’re a member of the Medium Partner Program. And, if you’re not already signed up for the partner program, what are you waiting for?

Submission rules — boring stuff, but it’s important

By submitting to Koinonia, you agree to comply with ALL our rules and requirements. Writers whose submissions are repeatedly rejected for rule violations may be removed from the publication.

All submissions must comply with Medium’s Rules and Ad-Free Policy. Stories behind the paywall must also comply with Medium’s Content and Curation Guidelines. We only accept unpublished drafts. Stories published outside of Medium are welcome to be submitted as unpublished drafts, but posts already published on Medium are not accepted. The only exception to this is if you have published the story on your own (not in another publication) within the previous 24 hours (yes, we can tell). Sometimes accidents happen, and we hit “publish” before we’ve submitted to our intended publication. We’ve probably all done it at one time or another. DO NOT DELETE AND TRY TO REPUBLISH THE SAME STORY. This is now unacceptable, according to Medium guidelines. All submissions must be family friendly. This means no detailed descriptions of sex, drug usage, or criminal activity. You can mention it if it’s critical to the story (some of the stories of our lives before Christ had some very dark moments), but you don’t have to dwell on it. Our readers are smart enough to fill in the blanks for themselves. Also, no swearing — not even “light” swearing. Some of us have found out the hard way that even words WE don’t consider to be swearing can be considered by OTHERS to be swearing. So, we want to avoid offending people. When in doubt, go ahead and submit, but please note the editors reserve the right to change any such language however we deem appropriate for our audience. We do not allow submissions whose sole intent is to sell or promote a book, blog, service, or product. If you really love something, and it fits in with one of our categories (see above), you can tell us about it — but tell us WHY you love it and why you think we would love it too. Remember, we want to build our readers up, not waste their time with yet another ad. If you have something you’ve created yourself that you would like to promote, you may include a single text link at the bottom of your submission. We do not publish any posts that are heavily political in nature. As a publication, we acknowledge Jesus as our King and ruler. More often than not, man-made politics cause division and harm. As stated above, we wish to avoid anything that could be harmful to others. All submissions must be in English. You are expected to fully edit any story before submitting to ensure it is as free from error as possible. Grammarly and Hemingway are excellent free tools you can use to help with this. Please, if English is not your first language, have a native English speaker read over your story before submitting. If you need more help with sentence structure or getting the words right, I offer personalized editing services for a small fee. You can reach me at the email listed at the end of this post if you’re interested in that — or if you have any questions about it. You retain all rights to your story and can remove it from Koinonia if you choose. However, we ask that you keep your submission with us for at least 30 days, and that you make no major changes to it once it has been published. Also, please note that if you habitually remove your stories from our publication, we may remove you as a writer. Submissions must follow our Style Guidelines, which you will find below.

Style guidelines — or how we want your story to look

These style guidelines are meant to ensure consistency of appearance, so Koinonia looks like any other high-quality publication online or off. When you are importing a story from another site, please be sure to check that your imported post meets these requirements before submitting.

Word Count — We publish stories with no more than 2000 words. There is no minimum. Title —Your title must be formatted with the big “T”. Capitalize all words except prepositions, articles, or conjunctions that have fewer than four letters. There should be NO period at the end. And use only single quotes, as relevant. Subtitle — You must use small “T” for this. Capitalize only the first word, proper nouns, or titles of works in italics or quotes. Again, there should be no period at the end, and use only single quotes, as relevant. Note: If you do not understand what we mean by big “T” and small “T,” check out this Medium post. Headings — You must also use the small “T” for all headings, which are definitely encouraged to add white space and ease of reading. Try to avoid adding punctuation (except for question marks) to the end of headings. Use single quotes when relevant. And capitalize only the first word and proper nouns. Kickers — These should be inserted above the title, using small “T.” Kickers are allowed, but they are not required. For more information on what kickers are and why you might want to use them, see this post. Quotes — All quotes, both scripture and otherwise, must be cited. Use block quotes (as in the example below). Words inside a block quote don’t need quotation marks, but it’s okay to add them.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things. (Philippians 4:8, NIV)

For block quotes, click the quotation marks (in the same black bar with the title and heading “Ts”) once; for pull-out quotes, click twice. They look like this:

Use pull-out quotes when you need a break in the text, but you’re not quite ready for another heading.

7. Pictures — Insert the first (feature) picture directly after the title and subtitle. The first image must be wider than column, but not as wide as panorama; therefore, use the third icon from the left.

Third image icon; Source: Screenshot by the author

All other pictures are to be in line with the text, and they should be above headings, not below. For these, use the second icon from the left.

Second image icon; Source: Screenshot by the author

All photos should be royalty-free and must have some citation regarding the source — Unsplash, Pixabay, etc., author’s photo, or however the author got permission to use the photo. We prefer that you include a hyperlink to the image source. This makes it easier for other people to locate, if interested. And it gives a little added “link love” to the artist.

Please do not end your post with an image or a video.

8. Tags — Please remember that you must include at least one tag from among the categories listed above: Christianity, Creativity, Health, Relationships, and Writing Tips. Medium allows you to include 5 tags for each story, so please make sure you’re including 5 tags for each story you submit.

9. Three Dots — Please do not use those three-dot section breaks (the last icon option under the + sign) within your story except to separate the text from your author bio. We reserve them for use before our Koinonia logo and publication information.

Medium section break icon under the + sign; Source: Screenshot by the author

10. Drop Caps — We do not allow the use of drop caps in any of our stories. We feel it hinders, rather than helps, the reading experience.

An example of what a drop cap is; Source: Screenshot by the author

11. Affiliate Disclosure — While we allow stories containing affiliate links, these links must be identified clearly, per Medium guidelines (see the link under Submission Rule #1).

How do you become a Koinonia writer?

You’ve made it this far, and you still want to write for Koinonia? Wow, that’s impressive!

Fill out and submit the following Google form:

Google Form used for becoming a Koinonia writer

Please note, we will only accept writers who already have at least three stories published on Medium (and one of those MUST tell how you got to know Jesus or share something about your intimate knowledge of or relationship with Him). So, while you wait, work on building up that Medium writing portfolio!

Not sure where to start when it comes to writing on Medium? Janis Cox offers a private Facebook course for $20 CAD that will walk you through everything you need to know. If you’re interested in — or have any questions about— this, you can contact her using the email listed below.

How do you submit a draft?

Once you are added as a Koinonia writer, you may follow Medium’s process for adding a draft to a publication. All submissions must be made through this process.

We accept and publish only one submission per writer per day.

We receive several submissions each day, and we manually evaluate each one. It can take up to 48 hours for us to do this. Please note we do not publish on Sundays.

If we feel a submission is not yet ready for publication, we’ll leave a private note (or possibly more than one) explaining why. Once you address the issues mentioned in the note(s), your story will be published, but not before then.

Do you have questions?

If you have any questions about anything, please feel free to reach out to us at pubkoinonia@gmail.com. We will get back to you as soon as we can.

Thank you so much for your interest in writing for Koinonia. We look forward to being in fellowship with you!

Click here for a shorter, downloadable version of our guidelines.