Five of My Articles Were Curated Overnight — Here’s Why

A deep investigation into a curation mystery

A few days ago, something very strange happened to me. Out of the last eight stories I’ve written, five were curated overnight.

Throughout the Medium community, people have many different relationships to curation.

Some say it’s the only way to succeed on Medium; others say it doesn’t do anything.

Some users manage a high curation rate, while others go months without getting curated.

This incident was a great opportunity to take out my Harriet the Spy magnifying glass and ask: why?

Why did a ton of my articles get curated overnight? Was it dumb luck? Was it a mistake? Is drawing attention to this incident going to send me into curation jail forever?

In my investigation, I want to give y’all possible reasons for why this happened and demystify the process.

The Last Article I Wrote

To best understand this incident, it’s important to dive into the last piece I wrote. It was a personal essay about music titled “This Album Helped Me Overcome My Social Anxiety” for one of my favorite Medium publications, The Riff.

The article was published on February 21st and curated by distributors on February 22nd.

I was recently made a Top Writer in Music in late January. Medium says that top writers are featured on tag pages. This added exposure may have led a curator to the article, especially since it was tagged under Music.

Being a top writer, like getting curated, is another aspect of Medium that’s still very fuzzy.

For more information, I’d highly suggest Casey Botticello’s article “How to Become a Medium Top Writer”. There’s a lot of great tips in there, like tags that qualify for top writer status.

His Medium Blogging Guide publication, overall, is a great resource about writing on Medium.

When I continued looking at the rest of my story’s stats on Medium, things got weird.

Four other articles were curated the same day, February 22nd:

• “I Wrote a Poem Every Day for a Month — Here’s What I Learned”
• “How Watching TV Can Make You a Brilliant Writer”
• “How Brandy’s ‘Cinderella’ Reminded Me Black Girls Can Be Princesses Too”
• “I Am a Proud Student of YouTube University”.

As for the ones that didn’t, I understood why:

• “How I Deal With Seasonal Depression During a Pandemic” was a very short read with minimal takeaways for the reader.
• “The Surprising Secrets of Achieving Mediocre Success on Medium” was about Medium. Medium-centered stories are disqualified from distribution.
• “Limber” is a poem — and…maybe I’m trash at writing poetry?

There’s also another possible reason why I recently got curated. I’ve been focusing on an important aspect of writing that’s often forgotten by Medium writers.

What I Learned By Studying the Greats

A writing tip I stand behind 100% is studying the writers you admire. I think it makes a big difference, especially on Medium. I don’t try to emulate the topics they talk about, but I do study their formatting.

Ayodeji Awosika, who currently has 83K followers on Medium, is a writer I’ve been studying recently. His articles are clean, concise, and super easy to read.

Here are a few formatting changes I’ve been making:

• Using the big “T” for headings and the little “T” for subheadings in the Medium editor
• Having short paragraphs and playing with white space
• Using one text emphasis tactic (bolding, italicizing, etc.)

Even though these formatting changes are important, they aren’t on all the articles that were curated. So…*shrugs*.

What About the Money?

I’ll be watching the aftermath of this curation burst to see if it correlates to a substantial boost in earnings. From what I’ve seen, curation does help but there’s definitely a point where it dies out.

Curation magic doesn’t last forever. If something wild happens, I’ll give y’all an update.

This may just turn out to be an ego boost.

Takeaways

The reason why five of my articles got curated overnight is probably due to a mixture of factors (last article, top writer status, formatting, luck). Sadly, there’s no way to know for sure.

Curators are humans and humans are unpredictable.

I’m just going to thank the Curation Gods and focus on creating quality content. If I keep working at it, things will keep working out.

Nia Simone McLeod is a writer, content creator, and pop culture enthusiast from Richmond, Virginia. Follow her on Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram for more dope digital content. She runs a weekly newsletter focused on inspiring creators of color.