ILLUMINATION Writing Academy Opens Its Doors to Writers as our First Community Publication
Writers can now publish their own stories approved by our editors and curators
Dear writers and readers of ILLUMINATION Community,
I established the ILLUMINATION community in March 2020, starting with only 100 writers, and it has now grown to 36,000+ writers contributing to our publications on multiple platforms like Medium, Substack, and ILLUMINATION community blogs on my website.
Our main publication, ILLUMINATION, has gained over 218,000 readers on Medium. This new initiative will replicate the vision and mission of our beloved publication, ILLUMINATION-Curated, which I closed and rebranded in June 2024, as its high quality did not match Medium’s relatively low quality standards, focusing on sensational content rather than content with substance from thought leaders and practitioners.
ILLUMINATION Writing Academy is a community publication that will publish curated content from established writers from multiple platforms, including Medium and best-selling Substack writers, to inform, guide, and inspire aspiring freelance writers. You can see this as the reincarnation of ILLUMINATION-Curated to illuminate society with valuable content and outstanding stories to inspire, inform, and educate.
We will invite guest writers to submit their best stories, and our 180 senior editors will review and edit their content before publishing it here. In this first phase, we plan to publish around 5 to 10 stories on different topics daily and curate them in a weekly newsletter for our readers.
All stories must adhere to our policies as documented in the master onboarding pack, Substack rules, and expectations of our loyal readers. We don’t accept harmful content like hate speech, defamation, and misleading claims. All stories must be written by humans, so we don’t accept AI-generated content.
The purpose is to create visibility of your stories and give curated content to our members. You can introduce your work briefly and link your Substack newsletters at the end of your story as a CTA.
This new project will start soon. All community members are welcome to join this initiative. Due to the large number of our writers, we will implement this project phase by phase and will scale it out as we increase our editorial and curation resources.
This is a complex process, so we will appreciate your support, understanding, and patience until we mature the publishing process. If this project becomes successful, we will transfer our 17 publications from Medium to Substack. This is a massive project requiring significant effort.
I will keep you informed with the process and progress regularly in newsletters.
Please feel free to ask questions on this bulletin or contact me via our Slack Workspace.
Best regards,
Owner and Chief Editor of ILLUMINATION Integrated publications
I wrote a personal story about our past and future:
Our curation team,
will continue featuring your newsletters through the Substack Mastery of the ILLUMINATION Community. editors will share weekly posts in the ILLUMINATION Library for Freelance Writers.You can meet our initial editorial team listed in this introduction newsletter:
Great initiative really loved the idea. It just feels like Medium, would love to contribute for this community as a writer and editor.
I love this initiative, Dr Yildiz. I will be very happy to support the process both as an editor and curator. You also inspired me to transition my Gaming and Videos/Podcasts publication from Medium to Substack. I will make an editorial announcement for them and follow your established process. I created the place holders in my Media publication on Substack. You are paving the way for us and I am very grateful for your support.