Write for Entrepreneurship Handbook

Have an interesting startup story, product journey, or lessons learned from a venture’s success or failure? Bootstrapping? Side project? Brick-and-mortar? We’re looking for it all. Submit your story here.

Formerly entrepreneurshandbook.co

We want to hear from you.

As much as we’d love to see your writing get in front of our ambitious audience of 230k+ hungry entrepreneurs, designers, and creatives working hard to make a difference in the world — let’s talk about what makes a successful article in the publication.

We aim to publish around 20 quality articles a week. We will not accept more than one article from the same author in any given week unless they are being considered for a column. We are a small team so be reasonable with us and only expect responses from us on business days. We get lots of submissions and cannot give feedback.

Below are the writing style guidelines for Entrepreneurship Handbook that, if followed, will help you write a well-crafted story that our readership will find interesting and helpful. We are intentionally very selective with the writers we pick to give the highest quality for our readers.

Entrepreneurship Handbook Style Guide

• “How-tos are beautiful.” This is a handbook publication — it’s purpose is to help people become better entrepreneurs and creators. A how-to post accomplishes that goal perfectly. Tell your story of your success (or failure) and walk us through it. Include takeaways. The goal is a balanced mix of theoretical and practical.
• Here’s our secret formula:

Inspirational story + practical takeaways = 😍

• POVs: Second-person is good, third-person is better, first-person is best. Using the second-person is everyone’s go-to as the way to sound authoritative or passionate. But, too often, it comes across as commanding and, well, bossy. Third-person is pleasing because it puts the writer in the background and tends to yield a cleaner, journalistic tone. First-person is the best because it puts the reader in the driver’s seat with the writer, experiencing the raw emotion and action of your story. We prefer the latter, enjoy the middle, and begrudgingly accept the former.
• Try to always include takeaways at the end. Sometimes, the truth in a story isn’t easy to apply to one’s life. A small list of takeaways gives the reader a clear path to change themselves, take action, and improve their lives or the lives of others. Give the reader a chance to take action. We are talking about entrepreneurship here, people, not fiction.
• Examples, examples, examples. Entrepreneurship is all about doing. The best way to learn entrepreneurship is to learn from people who have done the things (success and failure are equally good to write about). When writing for EH, use examples. If you don’t have any from your own life, do some research and find those who have.
• Reading time of at least 4 minutes. Give us meat, whether it’s a 1000-word single-lesson experience or a 3,500-word monumental life lesson with deep takeaways. Both, and anything in between, are great. Err on the side of brevity, but not too short. Your post will be rejected if there’s too much “fluff” or unnecessary verbosity.
• Follow Medium’s extensive curation guidelines. Failure to do so is one of the most common reasons for rejection. We have stricter standards than Medium’s new guidelines.
• Read our recent posts and follow their formatting. Have a title, subtitle and cover image. Don’t add crazy formatting or a hundred irrelevant images. Don’t make it harder for us to work out if your writing is any good.
• Submit original Medium articles only. If your story exists elsewhere (Linkedin, X, YouTube, etc.), send us a note first at editors@ehandbook.com.

This style guide is subject to change at any time and will likely grow. We’re confident that this will help you write in a way that resonates with our readers and the Medium community at large.

Stories we are looking for:

1. Business ideas (17 Hyper-Specific Business Ideas Ready for Stealing)
2. Idea-to-Income (We Ate Rice Only. Now We Make $500,000 Per Year.)
3. Failure tales (5 Crucial Lessons for First-Time Founders)
4. How to scale (The Ugly Pie, Marc Andreessen, and the Most Important Lesson for Small-Town Entrepreneurs)
5. How to raise money (14 Rare Lessons on Raising Money From a Serial Entrepreneur With 30 Years of Pitching Experience)
6. Exit events (How to Sell Your Startup for a Big Payout)
7. How to monetize an app (This Ex-Googler Sells Her Half-Million Dollar Home to Build a Podcast Mega-Platform)
8. How to make more money (Exactly How I Landed My Most Lucrative Freelance and Consulting Deals)
9. Interviews with Recognized CEOs, Entrepreneurs, Founders (Startup Lessons from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel (An Interview))

Stories we are NOT looking for:

1. Career advice
2. List of inspirational quotes
3. Generic leadership advice
4. General money advice
5. Hiring best practices
6. Stories that are missing personal anecdotes or data
7. Medium advice
8. Content marketing

What you shouldn’t do:

1. Do not add our editors on social media and demand to be added. You will be ignored.
2. If rejected, do not show a bad attitude, it will never help your chances.
3. Don’t write a story for us if you have no interest in entrepreneurship and are simply ticking a box to try to get views.
4. Don’t copy an article we have already published, we will spot it.
5. Don’t send us an article with affiliate links when you are trying to get into the publication for the first time.
6. Don’t submit a partial story (i.e., directing readers to go to another website to “read the full post”) for lead generation.

Submit here

This is the BEST way to be added as a new writer. You’ll hear back within 7 days.

Any questions? Shoot us an email at editors@ehandbook.com

Best of luck!

Editors of EH