Have a lot to say? Good. We love to dive deep into complex topics, and so do our readers. Here’s how you can publish longform posts, columns, and online books on TDS.
Longform posts
We love long reads! If your article’s reading time is shorter than 25 minutes, we recommend that you don’t break it into multiple pieces — keep it as-is. A single post makes it easier for readers to search and find all the information they need, and less likely that they’ll miss an important part of your argument.
To create a smoother reading experience, you can add a table of contents to orient your audience around your post. Adding high-quality images and lots of white space is always a good idea, too — a long text doesn’t have to be a wall of text.
We regularly add the most engaging and thoughtful longform posts to our Deep Dives page.
Columns
If your post’s reading time exceeds 25 minutes, or if you plan to focus on the same topic over multiple articles and a longer stretch of time, you can create your own TDS column. All it takes are three steps:
- Add a custom tag to your post. This tag needs to be unique and reflect the theme of your project. Every time you publish a post with that tag, it will be added to your column’s landing page: towardsdatascience.com/tagged/[your-tag].
- Add a kicker to your post. It’s like adding a subtitle but above your title.
- Link your kicker to your column’s landing page.
You can create a TDS column and invite multiple authors to contribute. Just let your colleague(s) know which tag you decided to use so that they can add the same one to their articles. Here are some examples from our team.
Online Books
A column is a great format to use if you have an open-ended topic that you plan to write about for a while. If, on the other hand, your idea has a finite, defined scope and a clear sense of progression from one post to the next, you may want to create a series of articles that feels more like an online book. Here is the format we recommend using.
Keep the reading time of each article — or “chapter” — between 12 to 25 minutes, and aim for a series that has at least 5 articles (but probably not more than, say, 16). You can add links to previous or subsequent items from within each article — for example, in the introduction and/or conclusion.
To publish your online book, you can submit all your articles to our editorial team in one go, or one by one as you finish working on each. We’ll review them and publish them as they come along. Let us know your post is part of a planned online book project.
Please ensure that each article or online book chapter follows the same guidelines and rules as any other post that TDS publishes. If you ever decide to sell or exclusively license your book to a third party publisher, you will have to make sure you have their consent to continue to publish the book with TDS. If you do not have such consent, it is your responsibility to remove your content from the TDS publication.
