Medium | Curation |Writing

First I Focused on Winning the Curation Lottery

Watching the Watchers

When I joined Medium, I miscalculated in a big way. I joined the Partner Program, but didn’t fill out the payment details. It always makes me uncomfortable putting my banking info on someone else’s database. I figured I’d see how it went and if I made some money, I’d input my bank information then.

Well, that backfired. The first month of stories weren’t eligible for payout. Lesson learned.

My next struggle was curation. I assumed I knew how the process worked and thought it would eventually happen to me. I thought being curated was the result of a logical chain of events.

If I followed the rules, wrote quality articles and posted frequently, the editors would find me. It took longer than I thought it would.

The odds of my story being curated felt similar to the odds of winning the lottery. Attainable as long as I kept buying tickets.

Then in late December I was successful!

The result? There was a small uptick in reads but it wasn’t much. I realized curation wasn’t all I’d made it out to be. So I focused on writing.

Then it happened again. Several times in a row. It seemed an editor had found my work and put my name on a list. They were watching me.

I decided to watch them back.

I thought there might be a pattern to exploit. I enjoy statistics, so I opened a spreadsheet and input everything I knew about the successful stories. The date and time I published, the date and time the story was curated. The publication name and the Medium topic assigned. Then I summarized the data several ways to see if there were any trends.

From December to May 2020, here are my results:

Number of articles curated by Month: Dec ……...3 Jan ……...2 Feb ………1 Mar …….. 9 Apr ………4 May………6

As you can see, I got off to a good start and quickly spiralled down.

Articles curated by Publication: Wild Heart Writers …..6 Illumination ………….6 Whispers of Magic..…13

When I joined Illumination in March, things began to pick up again.

In total, I’ve been curated 25 times so far. In Topics ….8 In Poetry ..17

To be fair, most of my initial submissions were poems so the results are a bit skewed.

Here are some of my stories curated in topics, in no particular order.

I find it interesting that the topics include: mindfulness, food, business, travel, transportation, fiction,health, religion, books and psychedelics. That’s pretty diverse!

I’m not the poster child for curation by any means.

It’s still the beginning of my journey here. I’m making less than a $1 a day, which puts me in the majority of writers here, but it’s something. I’m working on improving my numbers.

Another cool fact: I calculated the average number of days from publishing to curation and for now it’s 3 days. That was a surprise. It felt like it took longer.

I had 4 poems curated on the same day they were posted.

That amazing feat occurred 3 times in March and 1 in April. The longest time it took for a poem to be curated was 12 days.

Here is a sample of the poems that have been curated, including a few Haiku.

If you’re still reading, here are a few tips that I believe made a difference.

• Quality writing. That goes without saying.
• Edit mercilessly.
• -Use popular tags that are relevant to your article.
• Choose titles that are click-worthy.
• Share on social media and tag Medium as well as your publication.
• Read the curation rules and follow them. I am still discovering rules I didn’t know existed.
• Engage with other writers.

Remember that curation isn’t the ‘be all end all’. Readers are the key.

I still get a rush when I receive a curation message in my email, but I know it’s not my only writing goal.

But I’m still keeping tabs on the process.

Tag me @treelangdon or add a message to this post if you’d like to connect. I’m a‘Top Writer’ in Poetry on Medium. Find me on Twitter and Facebook.

Here are a couple of my favorite poems that weren’t curated, but I feel they should have been.