Writing for Exploring History

Interested in writing for Exploring History?

First, you must love history! It is a demand!

Kidding aside, we are looking for people who are just as fascinated by history as we are and who are just as excited at the prospect of telling historical stories.

We are also looking for people who want to have fun. When retelling history it is important to be accurate, but you should also enjoy doing it too. You should want to write the things that interest you. We here at Exploring History want to help you with that.

When you become a writer with us, you also get to join the Exploring History Slack channel, where we collaborate on writing and history, in addition to sharing lots of dank history memes. It’s a lot of fun, and we’d love for you to join. Please note, this is by request. If you want to join the Slack channel you have to ask, but feel free if you haven't been added.

Style Guide

Title and Subtitle

Your story should have a title that reflects the historical story you are telling. Your subtitle should expand upon your title, adding more detail and information.

As for formatting, your title should be in all upper case, and your subtitle should be in sentence case. A subtitle should only have periods or punctuation if it is over one sentence long. Otherwise, it is unnecessary.

Here is an example:

When you see this title and subtitle, it is apparent what this story is about. Stories with titles that reflect their content will get more views and make more money than stories with vague or misleading titles.

Photos

The featured photo is the photo readers will see when your story is visible on their dashboard. Along with your title and subtitle, your photo is your most important opportunity to catch your reader’s eye.

On Exploring History, we place the featured photo above the title and subtitle. Here is an example of that:

Your photo must be at least as wide as the body text on the page. It can be wider if you want.

Your featured photo should achieve two things:

1. Representing what your story is about.
2. Being appealing to your reader’s eye.

First of all, it needs to represent your story. If you’re writing about 1940s Germany why would a picture of cats need to on there? Unless you are writing about how cats were in Germany in 1940. That is fair game.

Secondly, it should be a beautiful photo. Readers are not likely to click on a story with an ugly photo, even if the photo is relevant to the story. It should emotionally appeal to your reader. It should appeal to the wider audience and connect to what they see in your writing.

When it comes to choosing a photo, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel— not everyone is Robert Capa. You can use Medium’s Unsplash integration to find a beautiful, copyright-free photo for your article.

Tags

Your title, subtitle, and feature photo are designed to appeal to your readers. Your tags are designed to appeal to Medium’s search algorithm. They are what determines whether or not your story gets distributed by Medium’s search engine.

Therefore, it’s important to pick the best tags. Here is a guide on how to do that:

Also, you get five of them for each article. Use them all. You never know which tags will work best, so there is no harm in using all five.

Never Say “Thanks For Reading”

Last but not least, do not say “Thanks for reading” or otherwise congratulate your reader for getting to the end of your story. If you look around at professional journals and reputable sources, as well as at popular Medium stories, you will see they do not do this. Neither should you.

How to Submit to Exploring History

If you want to write for Exploring History just follow this process:

1. Email [email protected] to be added as a writer: leave your Medium profile, a bio, and an email you want to use for slack
2. We add you as a writer as soon as possible
3. Submit your stories (preferably unpublished drafts) via this process
4. We will edit, schedule, and publish your story as quickly as possible

In Conclusion

This last note is a message to you the writer. Thank you for doing what you do. History is not just a passion for us, it is us. We immerse ourselves into things we enjoy and often we want to accomplish a goal that gives us fulfilling lives. We hope that we can help with that here on Exploring History and hope that you enjoy doing it.

Thank you for reading, and we hope you’ll be a part of our team.