About The Writing Cooperative
Delivering a Better Reading Experience to Our Audience
Why We Updated Our Submission Rules and Added a Style Guide
At the Writing Cooperative, we have been working behind the scenes to improve the quality of the articles we accept for our publication in order to deliver a better reading experience to our audience.
Recently we updated our Submission Requirements and included a Style Guide to help our writers understand the type of submissions we are looking for. If you are a writer for our publication or plan to become one, it is imperative you read through our new submission requirements thoroughly.
We Want to Curate and Distribute Your Writing Throughout Our Network
We have set up our own internal system to select and elevate the best of the best articles in our publication through our own newsletter and front page features. If selected, your article will be featured in the Editor’s Choice section at the top of our homepage and will be distributed in our newsletters to our followers, writers, and patrons. This means a lot more views and potentially a lot more money for your locked articles, which brings me to my next point…
We Prefer Locked Articles
Medium provides all users the option to publish stories behind their paywall. This ensures the submission is reviewed by Medium’s curators for wider distribution and brings the potential for you to receive compensation through Medium’s Partner Program. While we will continue to accept free articles, we are unlikely to elevate these articles as Editor’s Choice and distribute them through our network. If you are submitting to our publication, we urge you to put your work behind the Medium paywall. Doing so helps you the writer, us the publication, and Medium the platform.
What We Mean by ‘High Quality’
We recently made a change to our submission rules which states — All submissions must help writers improve their craft, be of high quality, and have a clear point or purpose.
Quality can at times be subjective and at other times be objective. And while it may be difficult to find objectively high quality work, objectively low quality work is easy to spot. There are times we receive submissions that meet all of our other criteria and yet are rejected due to a lack of quality.
There could be a plethora of reasons a submission is rejected for lack of quality, such as redundancy, bad chronology, too much vulgarity, too much detail, not enough detail, too many anecdotes, meandering thoughts, etc.
If we point to this clause as the reason for rejection it is likely your draft needs some work. Due to the volume of submissions, we will not be able to respond to all inquiries as to specific reasons articles are rejected. We urge you to join our Slack #drafts channel and ask other writers in our community for help on improving your rejected articles.
If your article has minor issues, we will let you know what those are and ask you to resubmit. Resubmitted articles go to the back of the queue. Keep in mind that our submission queue will sometimes have over 50 or 60 drafts waiting to be reviewed so this process of re-review may take some time.
Once your article is reviewed and accepted, it is scheduled to publish several days out. In essence, it may take up to two weeks from the time of submission to the time of publication. Please be patient with the process.
If at first…
The bottom line is we are rejecting a lot more articles than we used to. If your article is rejected, do not despair. Keep writing. Keep improving your craft. That’s why we are all here in the first place.
We look forward to your next submission!
