Why Was My Article Declined?
Posted by Editing StaffWe get asked this question several times per day by authors so I felt it was a good idea to talk about it openly and hopefully help some of you avoid ever having to wonder about it in the first place.
I have to start by saying if you have an article declined please don’t take it personally. It is not a reflection on you nor any sort of personal judgement about your ideas and opinions.
In almost every instance that a submission is declined it is because the content somehow violated one of our few “Submission Guidelines” in some way and has nothing to do with the theme or idea of the articles.
A few good tips for making sure your articles aren’t declined are:
- Use your best grammar. We know not all of our authors (or readers) claim English as their first language and we do our best to not exclude anyone who submits their best efforts to us. If the idea of your article is understandable we’re not going to decline it because of any minor grammar mistakes, but we do ask that you submit your best efforts in return.
- Don’t write in all caps.
- Don’t use over-sized fonts for your whole article. It’s acceptable to highlight key points in an article with bold or larger text, but don’t do it with the whole article.
- Don’t try to stuff keywords or extra links into your articles and resource box.
- Don’t use automated article writing/rewriting and submission software. Most of the time we can tell right away when something was written/rewritten by software, these programs leave fairly clear ‘footprints’ in the articles or submissions that we can spot, and in the past we’ve been fairly easy going about automated submissions if the article was good quality, however moving forward the decision has been made to decline everything created or submitted by automated software, so don’t use anything that attempts to circumvent our system.
Now, to end this posting on a more positive note, here are a few Do’s that will help ensure your articles get approved and will help to increase the number of people who read them:
- Use images in your articles. We provide an easy to use submission editor that lets you include images with the click of a button and we encourage you to use it often. Over the past 2 years one thing has become very clear to us about articles published here, the articles that get the most views are the ones that are well written, thorough on the topics they cover, and include images. People like pictures and our stats show it.
- Beef-up your author’s profile. You can add an About Me bio blurb, a signature, your website or blog URLs, your Twitter contact info, pictures and more to your profile page, and the authors who use these features get a lot more interest than the authors who don’t. Plus, to get highlighted on our main page Author Showcase you must have a picture on your profile.
- Be interesting in your writings.
- Be entertaining in your writings.
