How to Write a Roundup Story Using Your Medium Back List
It’s a great way to keep your older posts in play
Once you’ve posted lots of stories on Medium, it’s hard for your readers to find all the hidden gems you wrote in the past.
But there’s a good way to make sure this back list of stories gets noticed and read again and again. It’s called a roundup story.
A roundup story is just like it sounds. You choose an interesting topic and then collect a series of stories you’d like to showcase and then write a post around them.
It works especially well if you write self-help, how to or motivational stories.
Here’s how you do it:
- Review your back list stories and look for topics you write about often.
- Jot down several topics that spark for you and make a list of stories that fit under that topic.
- Select one of the topics and choose the stories from your list that you want to include. It could be as few as 2 or as many as 5. But don’t go overboard and make sure they are connected in some way to your topic.
- Write a snazzy headline that will draw your readers in.
- Write a beginning paragraph that explains the overall idea of your story.
- Introduce each link with a paragraph or two.
- Write a concluding paragraph that ties everything together.
- Review and then Publish it.
Here’s two roundup stories I’ve written as examples.
This first story is a compilation of articles that showed how I achieved my goal of writing 70 stories on Medium.
I used the 70th story as a starting point and then segued into why I chose the goal and the changes I made in my life to make it become a reality.
And in another roundup story I wrote about all the lessons I learned writing on Medium in a series of stories about my journey.
Roundup stories are easy to write and very popular with readers. And it’s a good way to show a path they can use to inspire their own journey.
Key Message: Experiment with writing roundup stories to showcase your work and get more reads. In the process you might even uncover a topic for a book you might want to write someday.
And yes, this is a roundup story about roundup stories :)
Linda Locke is a writer and mentor/teacher. She lives in Southern California in Ventura County by the Coast with her husband and lots and lots of books.
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