Creator Ops Submission Guidelines

May 12, 2026essays

From the Desk of the EIC

Creator Ops Submission Guidelines

An honest contract between writer and editor for the Medium publication that wants the texture back

Every pitch that hits my inbox gets read.

Most get killed before they reach a second paragraph, and I’m telling you why upfront so you don’t burn an afternoon writing something that ends up in my trash folder.

That’s called being the Editor in Chief. So stop fucking whining about it and get good.

This publication is not for everyone. By design.

What Creator Ops Is

Creator Ops publishes operational writing for people running small creator businesses.

Solo operators and two-person shops. The folks who answer their own emails at midnight and pack their own orders on a Sunday afternoon while the dog watches from the couch.

The audience here already tried the guru playbook. They sat through the webinar, bought the course, watched their bank balance refuse to do what the sales page promised. They came back looking for someone who does the work and tells the truth about what happened.

That is the bar. Truth from someone who did the thing.

More Open Than Most

I am running this looser than most Medium editors.

Other publications get stuck up their own ass about credentials, formatting trivia, prior publication history, and other things that have nothing to do with whether the piece is any good.

I do not run this place that way.

Credentials, follower count, prior publication history, AI involvement, fancy formatting tricks: none of it decides whether you get published here.

The question I am asking is simpler:

Did somebody who did the thing write a piece that teaches something useful?

What I Want

I want stories. The real kind. The kind that open with:

“I tried this and almost broke my business,” or “I ran this experiment for six months and here’s what the data showed me.”

Show me the receipts, the ugly spreadsheet, the screenshot of the email that flopped, the launch that went sideways at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. The grit of doing the work is what makes operational writing useful, and that grit is what most creator content has had sanded off.

How-to pieces are welcome. They have to be built on lived experience, though. If you haven’t done the thing you’re teaching, I will know. The reader will know. The piece will read like a textbook written by someone who has never been in a fight, and nobody comes back for that twice.

Topics I want to see more of

Pricing experiments where you tell me the before number, the after number, and what broke in the middle
Tool teardowns from someone who uses the tool daily, including the parts that suck
Catalog and inventory writing from solo product operators
Newsletter operations from inside the dashboard, not from a content marketing blog post
Launches that failed and what they cost you in dollars and sleep
Real hourly wage math on your “successful” creator business
Day-in-the-life field reports from the back of the operation
Cross-domain pieces where you apply something weird from your background to creator work

Pitches that would land here

Concrete beats abstract. Here are pitch shapes that would get my attention:

“I cut my product prices in half and watched something weird happen to my revenue”
“The Gumroad workflow I built after my third refund crisis”
“What I pay myself per hour when I include every minute of the operation”
“Why I killed my best-performing product and what replaced it”
“The launch that earned $4,000 and cost me a relationship”
“Three years running a newsletter without any of the guru-economy machinery”
“What happens when you A/B test a sales page against a story”
“The tool I stopped using and the spreadsheet I built instead”
“How I priced my first digital product and everything I got wrong”
“Why my best-converting piece was the one I almost deleted”

The shape stays consistent across them. Specific. First-person. Results attached. Stakes implied. The reader can tell from the title that the piece will deliver something they can use, written by somebody who lived it.

The throughline runs the same way through every piece I accept. You did the thing, you learned something from doing it, and now you are telling me about it the way someone tells a story at the bar after their shift ended. Save the four-hundred-dollar course pitch for somebody else.

What Gets Killed on Sight

Your pitch is going in the trash if it reads like any of this:

“How to scale your creator business to seven figures,” written by someone who has not scaled anything
Generic listicles about the top ten tools for content creators, especially the kind that exist to deliver affiliate clicks rather than teach anybody anything
Anything that uses the words “leverage,” “optimize,” “synergy,” or “ecosystem” as if those words still mean something
Mindset pieces about how to think like a millionaire creator while you are living off ramen and grant money
Anything that promises a system, a formula, a framework, or a blueprint without showing me what happened when you ran the thing
Pieces that lean on quotes from Naval, Hormozi, or any other patron saint of the creator-industrial complex in place of your own lived experience
The “I asked ChatGPT to write me an article about X” with no further human involvement, which I can smell from across the building

Ambition is welcome here. What I have no patience for is bullshit dressed up as ambition, and most pitches do not know how to tell the two apart.

AI Is Fine. Edit Your Goddamn Draft Anyway.

I do not care if you use AI to brainstorm, outline, draft, or polish. Use whatever tools work for you. I use AI tools myself, and pretending otherwise would make me a liar.

What I do care about is this: a person has to read the draft before it lands in my inbox. The same person needs to recognize the seven thousand AI tells that show up in unedited machine output and kill them with prejudice. Then read it out loud, the whole thing, to make sure it sounds like a human wrote it. Because a human should have.

If I open your draft and find em-dashes salted through every paragraph like rock salt on a December sidewalk, transitions like “moreover” and “furthermore” doing the job an actual sentence should be doing, or the word “delve” appearing more than once in the same piece, I will close the tab and forget your name by lunch.

Seriously. This is not really about whether AI touched it. That is just shit writing.

The signal you are looking for is simple. Would you read this draft out loud to a friend without wincing? If yes, send it. If no, fix it first.

The Hard Rules

Read these before you submit. They are not negotiable.

Previously published work is welcome. If it ran on your Substack, your blog, or your own Medium profile first, send it through. Set the canonical URL so SEO does not split between two copies of the piece. Note where it ran first so I have the context. The thoughts have to be YOUR thoughts on the subject, drawn from experience you actually have. The bar is identical to unpublished work: does the piece teach something useful, written by somebody who did the thing?
Behind the paywall. All accepted pieces go behind Medium’s paywall. That is how the Medium Partner Program pays you. If you opt out of the paywall, I cannot accept the piece.
Word count: 200 to 1500 for cold submissions. Hard ceiling at 1500. Anything shorter than 200 is a Note, not an article. If your piece needs more than 1500 words to do what it does, pitch me first. Tell me what the piece does and why it needs the room, and I will tell you whether to keep building or trim.
Affiliate links are fine. Label them. Disclose your affiliate links inside the piece, either in a line near the top or right next to the link itself. The reader has the right to know what they are clicking on. No bait-and-switch.
Promote your own stuff inside the piece when it fits the story. Writing about a launch? Link to what you launched. Built a tool? Mention it. This publication is about helping people make money, so getting snippy about creators making money would be hypocritical. The catch is simple. The piece has to teach something. A strategy, a technique, an angle, a lesson you paid for in money or sleep. If the piece delivers value, the link at the end takes care of itself without anyone having to be tricked into clicking it. What I will not publish is a piece that tees up a product with no operational substance underneath. That is a sales page, not an article, and Medium has its own rules about those.
Five outbound links is a soft ceiling. Not counting your author bio. If you need ten, the piece probably has structural problems.
Author bio: short and yours. Link where you want. I am not the bio police.
Follow Medium’s rules. Their rules apply on top of mine.

How to Help Your Piece Get Found

A few things decide whether your piece reaches readers or dies in the void. This is how the Medium algorithm behaves in 2026, pulled from inside the dashboard, not from a content marketing blog post.

Subtitle

Medium pulls your subtitle into previews, SEO snippets, and the email digest. Make it work.

A good subtitle does two things at once. It tells the reader what they get if they keep reading, and it includes a keyword somebody would search for. Save the cryptic poetry for the body. The subtitle is a delivery vehicle.

Cover Image

A cover image is required for Boost eligibility and for showing up on most distribution surfaces. No cover image, no reach.

Pick something that fits the piece, not stock-photo hands-on-laptop slop. If you generate it with AI, caption that you did. If you photograph it yourself, even better.

First Paragraph

If a reader bounces in the first three sentences, the algorithm logs it as a weak piece. Get to the point. Open in media res. No “in today’s fast-paced creator economy” intros, no warm-up paragraphs about how you’ve been mulling something over lately.

Those opening sentences are the most expensive real estate in the building. Treat them that way.

Subheadings

Use H2s every 300 to 400 words minimum. Two reasons: scannable structure helps readers finish your piece, and Medium’s algorithm uses heading hierarchy to parse what the piece is about. A wall of text reads as low quality to both humans and machines.

Pull Quotes

Use the Medium pull quote feature once or twice in any piece over 1000 words. It gives readers visual rest, lets the algorithm identify your strongest line, and shows up cleanly when somebody highlights or shares.

Internal Links

When you reference a related Creator Ops piece, link to it. When you cite somebody else’s relevant Medium piece, link to that too. The algorithm rewards internal Medium links, and you build the publication. External links are capped at five per the Hard Rules. Internal Medium links are not capped.

Image Alt Text

Every image needs alt text. Accessibility matters, and the algorithm reads alt text as additional context. Skipping this is unforced error territory.

Reading Time

Medium displays read time prominently and feeds it into distribution decisions. Three to six minutes is the sweet spot for completion, which maps to the upper end of the word count range in the Hard Rules. Shorter pieces still land if they earn their brevity. Anything that runs past six minutes sheds readers fast unless the writing is magnetic, which is why long pieces need a pitch first.

How to Submit

Creator Ops is open to all submissions. Follow the publication on Medium, write your draft, and send it through. Standard Medium workflow:

Follow Creator Ops on Medium
Write your draft inside the Medium editor
Click the three dots at the top right of the draft
Select “Add to publication” and pick Creator Ops
Hit Submit

Unpublished drafts get a slight edge, since I can suggest title, subtitle, and cover image direction before the piece ships. Previously published work is welcome too. Submit it the same way and I will add it to Creator Ops if it fits. One caveat: if the piece is already in another Medium publication, you need to withdraw it from there first before I can pull it in here.

Submitting does not guarantee I will publish. If your piece does not meet the bar, I will reject it. That is not personal. It means the piece needs another editing pass, or it does not fit Creator Ops, or both. Edit it and try again when you have something stronger. I will keep reading.

My Side of the Deal

Here is what I owe you in return.

Response time: seven to ten business days from submission. If you have not heard from me by then, send one polite nudge. One. Two follow-ups in a week and I will start to remember your name in the wrong way.
Editing scope: I reserve the right to edit titles, subtitles, cover images, and obvious typos. Anything beyond that, I will suggest as a comment in the draft and let you decide. Nothing gets changed in the body of your piece without your sign-off.
Promotion: Accepted pieces get shared in my Substack newsletter when the timing fits, and on whatever Medium-internal promotion tools the platform makes available. You handle your own socials. I am one operator with a small newsletter, not a marketing department.
Rejection notes: if I have notes worth your time, I will send them. If I do not, I will pass quietly. Either way, you will know within the response window.

A Final Word

Creator Ops exists because most creator writing has gone slack. The texture of actual work has been sanded off and replaced with frameworks that do not survive contact with a Tuesday afternoon, and the result reads like it was assembled by a content marketing intern who has never once shipped a product or answered a customer email at eleven at night.

I am trying to keep the grit in. If you have done the work, if you can write about it without slipping into guru cosplay, you should pitch me.

I will be the one reading your draft at one in the morning, cold coffee on the desk, the dog asleep on my feet, and no patience for theater.

Last updated: May 11, 2026 Edited and run by J.D. Forrest, Creator Ops. He also runs Niche of One.

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Creator Ops Submission Guidelines

From the Desk of the EIC