ESSAY

Why I Don’t Submit To Your Publication Anymore

If you were wondering why writers stop bothering to submit their work to your obscure publication, here is something to think about.

I started publishing stories and essays to Medium last Christmas. Several people had encouraged me to try it, so over the Christmas break I made an effort to learn about the platform and wrote a bunch of pieces. I got things published in a variety of places. Nothing crazy. Nothing blew up. Didn’t make any money. But it was sort of fun anyway.

But after a bit, I no longer saw the point of working that hard for free. Here I was writing at a high enough level to be published (presumably) only to be told by power drunk editors that I needed to change my writing style because they felt they had a better understanding of what readers wanted than I did.

I’ve been writing for a long time and do it professionally for quite a bit of money. In fact, in the commercial world, I’m highly valued precisely because I understand what people want.

But here in this particular Medium, I found editors who had a lot of arbitrary rules that they had determined were a sign of good writing, or a at least a reflection of their own personal styles. Do this. Don’t…