So You Want To Be Curated?
How to Get Attention from Editors
Medium and its publications have curation guidelines. The writers of curated stories follow guidelines. You should too if you want to be curated.
I’ve only been on Medium for three months. I’m not a famous writer, political figure, or well-known media person. I haven’t even finished my first book.
I have promised three of the granddaughters a copy of that first book, Oh Look . . . There’s a Squirrel and Other Stories, will be under the Christmas tree for each of them. They know it’s dedicated to them. They know there’s a story in the book about them. They’ve read the pdf. I’d like to think the book will be in my son’s hands for his birthday on October 15. But I haven’t made that promise. Of course, he’s in the book too.
I write often. The goal is everyday. Some weeks I meet my goal. Some weeks I don’t. I get curated a couple times a week on a regular basis. Other writers I know say things like “Wow, MaryJo, you sure are lucky.” Or “I’ve written as often as you have, and I’ve never been curated. Guess some people just hit the jackpot.”
Listen up you wanna-be-curated writers. It is NOT luck. No luck involved. (I’ve only been lucky once in my life: One Christmas at a church potluck, I won a raffle for 50 pounds of chocolate. The bag broke when we put it in the car, and for a couple months Hershey Kisses and miniature Kit Kat bars rolled out from under the seat.)
Now others of you are going to say, “Sure, but MaryJo, you have years of experience as a ghost writer and an editor. You know how to write.” That’s true. I do have that experience. But some of what I think are my best stories haven’t been curated, including stories that have gotten the most claps and responses. And I’ve read some ho-hum mediocre stories that have been curated.
So How Can You Get Curated? (OK, if you’re in a hurry, you can skip down to my list of curation guidelines. However, I think you’ll understand the process better if you first read what follows below.)
Getting curated is all about the guidelines. You could even call them “rules.” I haven’t found a list of these or I’d give you a link. But I’ve figured it out intuitively. I’ve figured it out from reading curated stories and not only of top writers. I’ve studied my own writing and asked questions “Why did this article get curated and that one didn’t?” “What’s the difference between these two stories?”
Years ago, I was the Editor of the National Women’s Studies Association Journal. As Editor, I set the guidelines for what articles we would choose to have read by outside readers for possible inclusion in the journal. We received dozens of articles every week. Most were rejected on the spot, never making it to an outside reader.
Many excellent articles were rejected because the authors didn’t follow our guidelines. Sometimes in the rejection letter, I would suggest that the author submit an excellent article to the appropriate journal of her specific discipline.
We only had four guidelines, a couple of which were somewhat out of the normal guidelines for academic journals. Odd as it might seem, these guidelines are not that different from the basic outline of curation standards for Medium.
Four General Guidelines I Used Before I Started Writing for Medium
- The article had to be in language that anyone could read. No academic jargon. No discipline-specific language. We welcomed articles in science, but only if I, an historian who had jumped through hoops to avoid science in college, could read the submission. I suggest that you follow this guideline for readable writing if you want your articles curated.
2. The article had to follow standard Chicago Manual of Style or MLA (Modern Language Association) “rules” and formatting for footnotes. Medium also has standards. You don’t need to follow the CMS or MLA rules for Medium. But if you want to be curated, you must follow Medium’s standards. Don’t follow these standards, including the formatting, and your writing won’t be curated.
3. The article had to be well written and require minimal editing. Had to use standard punctuation and grammar rules. Had to be interesting. Boring didn’t make the cut. Medium has the same “rules.” Occasionally, a fabulous article in terms of content showed up on my desk with lousy writing and slopped up or missing footnotes, and we’d accept it. My staff and I would do the editing and fix the footnotes. Medium won’t edit for you, but it requires decent writing and following basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling rules. Avoid boring.
4. Preference always went to interdisciplinary articles. In other words, the article focused on a couple of different disciplines. For example, an historian might submit an article about Willa Cather, the great American novelist, and discuss how we learn about immigrant life in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century from her novel, My Antonia. That’s fiction and history.
Or a church historian might write about Bach and the way in which his nearly 200 cantatas relate to the liturgical calendar. That’s music and church. From my own experience, I’ve found that Medium likes stories that can make connections between two seemingly unrelated topics.
12 Unofficial Medium Guidelines for Curating (Note: These general guidelines will work for most publications too. And yes, you may know somebody who didn’t follow these and got curated anyway.)
Formatting
Kickers are at the top, followed by a title between 40-50 characters, then subtitle, picture with attribution, first sentence or first short paragraph of up to 156 characters. All words in the title are capitalized. Sub-headings in the content break up the text and help the reader know what’s going to follow.
There’s a good chance that even your best article won’t be curated if you don’t have the “proper” formatting. Medium, Illumination, top writers, and other publications stress this.
Again, here’s the formula: Kickers, Title, Subtitle, image with attribution, first sentence of the article.
Series don’t do well as readers don’t read stories sequentially. Series work on your website, and they’re great in email. Medium doesn’t allow series. Some publications do, but they don’t do well and probably won’t be curated.
Since you won’t be doing series, you can delete boilerplate at the top of your article that explains the series. Or any boilerplate except at the end of your article. (Boilerplate is that text you have saved on your computer that you add to everything you write: short bio, email, how to get your freebie, etc.)
Leave boiler plate to the end of your story. Insert three dots to show a break. Put the boiler plate in italic to set it off from your story. Curators won’t look at it. Google doesn’t like it. Most readers skip boilerplate, but it’s still a good idea to have it with a short bio and a link to your website with your freebie opt-in.
Titles (headlines) and 1st Sentences
It’s important to put time into learning how to create great titles/headlines and to practice writing 1st sentences. These two elements attract curators, readers, and Google first. If your title isn’t good and the 1st sentence or 1st short paragraph doesn’t grab a reader or curator, they’ll go on to another story.
For titles, google “how to write headlines” to learn what makes a good title. Then put your title in a title analyzer such as the free headline analyzer from CoSchedule. Sometimes, as in this article, the headline analyzer doesn’t work because my story is specifically about Medium. Usually it does.
Pictures
Stick to stock images and photos. Medium offers Unsplash free. I often use 123RF because the pictures are higher quality. You do have to pay for them although it’s considerably less expensive than other stock photo services.
A high quality photo of yours will work. However, I don’t recommend using your own images created from Canva or other editing programs. And don’t add your branding, name, website url, etc. to your image. Medium is not a platform for artistic creativity. Being creative, except for writing, doesn’t help one get curated.
Look for images that are crisp and uncluttered with bold colors. And don’t overdo images. Medium is a writing platform. If your story is long, you could stick in another image or two. Thumbnails to the side of the text are better than those that go across the page as they don’t interrupt the flow of reading.
Attribution
No image attribution means no curation and often no publication. And an editor will come after you! (This happened to me. It wasn’t pleasant.) Unsplash inserts the attribution for you. If it’s your picture, the attribution would be: “Image from Author’s Collection.”
Content
Stories, stories, stories. I write a lot of “how to write” articles. I always put stories in them or at least personal tidbits that relate to the piece I’m writing. Many writers like to write about rebounding from an accident or a divorce or losing a loved one. Their articles are filled with great advice but lack the story behind it. Those stories are rarely curated.
I understand how this might be difficult. For example, my husband and I lost a son to colon cancer at age 46 after an excruciating 2-year journey of debilitating illness, surgeries, loss of job, and other horrors. Some have asked me when I’m going to write Chris’ story. The answer is “maybe never but certainly not now.” That exercise would certainly end up with me in a “tearful-heap-on-the-office-rug.”
They tell me I could help people learn about colon cancer. That’s true but I wouldn’t write about colon cancer without writing Chris’ particular story. Unlikely it would be curated without the story. Then they remind me that I wrote about the death of my birth-father and the death of the father who raised me. Yes I did, but both deaths happened many years ago in 1944 and 1965. Not in 2019, the year Chris died.
Unlikely your motivational, feel good story will be curated if it doesn’t have the story that details your struggle. If you can’t write that story now without tearful-heap-on-your-office-rug, don’t write it.
If you worry that people’s feelings would be hurt or that they’d be angry because of a story, use a pen name. Whatever you write, find a way to tell a story.
Emotion
Unless it’s a how-to story, along with a good story, you article must pull some emotion from a reader. Make your readers feel sad or happy or hopeful. Get readers chuckling, even laughing out loud. If you’re not sure, ask yourself how the experience you’re writing about made you feel. Maybe it’s a “Wow, I just understood what happened.”
Compare “She acted in a somewhat dishonest way around that financial situation” to “OMG, she really took me to the cleaners over that sneaky business deal.” The second sentence has enough punch to have a reader agreeing, feeling bad for for you, maybe remembering something that happened to them.
Write What You Know
Writing about what you know is always easier than launching off into something you don’t know much about. And often it’s apparent to curators and readers that you don’t know a lot about the topic.
I have an article about Willa Cather and more in the hopper when I get my publication for books and book reviews going. I have read everything Cather wrote, some novels several times. I’ve read 3 biographies. In addition, my mother and her mother were born and lived in Red Cloud, Nebraska where Cather was born and a town she wrote about. I’ve been to Red Cloud. I can write about Cather.
I love the novels of Toni Morrison. But I’m not an expert. I haven’t read everything she wrote. I only know scant details about her life. I won’t be writing about her. Movie, music, book reviews are always better if you’re an expert in at least something about the movie or book: the author, the actors, the particular genre. Curators can tell if you know what you’re talking about.
I’m a classical music freak. I have all but the submitted thesis of a degree in musicology, but I still don’t write about classical music. (I threw my thesis in the fire.) Much of what would be interesting to others I don’t know enough about without tons of research.
One of these days I’ll write an article about the popularity of the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Yes, that’s the choral section that was conducted by Leonard Bernstein and sung by a huge choir in 1989 at the fall of the Berlin wall. But too much research required to write that today.
I adore opera. One of the biggest things I miss about having to shelter-in-my-office is not being able to go the Metropolitan operas at the movies. But I’m not an expert and would never attempt to write about opera.
I do have an article in the hopper about the last Met opera I saw at the movies, Porgy and Bess. But that’s a short piece about the audience and the woman I sat next to. A story about my experience and what I learned about opera lovers, not a story about the opera.
If your goal is to write daily, you don’t have time to do a lot of research. It’s why I have a long list of stories in draft form.
Details
It’s the little things that bring a story to life. Here’s an example: “I worked for a year and a half at a Corinthian College which later went broke, was sued for fraud, and was shut down by the Federal government in 2015.” Compare that to: “I worked at a for-profit college that closed.” The details in the first sentence make it more engaging than the second sentence. Just the word “fraud” adds to the intrigue.
Yup, you guessed it: another story in the hopper and one that doesn’t require much research. Spoiler alert: I adored that job even though I knew the school was a fraud and distrusted the administrators.
I know a lot about Bach. He’s my fave. That article is still unfinished as I need specific details I don’t know off the top of my head and haven’t taken the time to look them up. My family and friends think nobody on earth knows as much about Bach as I do. They are wrong.
What You’ve Learned
Took me awhile to get that one. Until recently I couldn’t understand why some of what I consider my best stories never got curated: I had left out what I learned.
I poured my heart into a story about the sudden death of my Father. All my friends who knew him loved the story. And talk about emotion: one of my friends who had known him since we were toddlers got teary while reading it.
Medium didn’t love it. It has a meaningless title unless you knew him. The picture illustrates the title so it’s meaningless also. Has a lousy first sentence, and it doesn’t tell what I learned about life. Didn’t explain what I learned about deep love and trauma at losing him in spite of a complicated and difficult relationship.
Story Structure
If you don’t get the structure right, you won’t be curated. And it’s easy to get it right. Every story has an introduction — that’s the first sentence or paragraph no more than 156 characters. Then the story has a middle: the details of your story. It ends with a conclusion, a short paragraph that summarizes the story.
Note: I do try to to stick to approximately 156 characters in the first paragraph You can be curated without doing that but if your paragraph is longer Google will truncate it.
This structure works for 1-minute read stories. It works for 15-minute stories. It even works for most non-fiction books.
Pundits say: “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em. Tell ’em. Then tell ’em what you just told ’em.”
Paragraph Length
Short paragraphs are supposed to be the rule. I’ve seen writers follow it so precisely that their writing resembles a list of bullet points. Short equally one-line or one-sentence paragraphs. More often short translates to no more than 2–3 lines.
I try for a happy medium: 4–5 lines of text. And I’ve gotten curated. Because I’m old and an academic, I write long paragraphs on auto-pilot. Then I go back and edit, aiming for no paragraph longer than 5 lines. Occasionally I write one-sentence or one line paragraphs for emphasis.
The best rule is to read your story aloud, paying attention to the flow. Two-line sentences rarely flow. Your writing ends up sounding choppy which comes from choppy writing.
Caveat: The reason for short paragraph length is to make people happy who read what you write on small devices. Long paragraphs can fill up a screen on a phone that fits in your pocket.
Curating doesn’t depend on the length of your article, although I recommend longer than two minutes or three minutes.
Look for the Unusual
As much as Medium doesn’t like veering away from the formatting guidelines and creative images, it loves creativity in writing. One of the first stories I had curated was about learning to be a perfectionist from celery.
Huh? How do those two things go together? What made the story interesting was finding out how I connected celery to editing. (And I’m not telling you. You’ll have to read the story. You’ll find the link at the bottom of the article.)
Put Yourself in Your Story
Many of us learned that it was a sin to use the word “I” in anything we wrote. Forget that rule and don’t fret about doing something sinful, especially in Medium. Medium is a community of writers who like to know each other.
I use the word “I” in every story. In “how-to” articles like this one, I use my own examples and how I learned what I’m showing you. I suggest you do the same. I’m not the only often-curated writer who does this. Curators aren’t into sin.
Revisions
Don’t forget that you can edit and revise your stories as many times as you choose. On my to-do list is rewriting titles on some of my earliest articles when I had no clue what I was doing. I don’t know for sure if re-publishing can lead to curation, but I know from experience that it gets you more readers.
Maybe one of your best stories isn’t doing so well. Sometimes changing only the title does the trick. You can even change out a picture.
Don’t forget to change your settings to reflect what you revised, especially if you change a title. (Go to “change display title” under the three dots next to the bell and your picture. And then to “more settings” and change the SEO title to match.)
Conclusion
I can’t guarantee you’ll get curated from following these suggestions, but I can guarantee that if you ignore them, it’s unlikely you’ll get curated. General formatting and including a story, preferably a personal story, are the biggies. Remember formatting is the first thing curators see.
Keep in mind that curation isn’t everything. It’s great, but it’s equally wonderful to get a bunch of readers and comments on a story that didn’t get curated.
I have stories a couple months old that didn’t get curated that readers find, clap for, and comment on. Puts a smile on my face. And I’ve had curated stories that only curators liked even though my story was promoted in “curated stories.”
Some Examples of Guidelines Mentioned in the Article:
Kickers, Tags, Settings, and Doing titles https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-easily-use-kickers-tags-settings-seo-and-keywords-424b6aa7
Why You Don’t Need the Chicago Manual of Style (or any out-of-date style guide) https://readmedium.com/toss-your-chicago-manual-of-style-c404d8fbcbb
How to Use Pictures in Medium https://readmedium.com/is-a-picture-worth-1-000-words-8e942aaeb63a
Perfectionism and Celery https://readmedium.com/is-a-picture-worth-1-000-words-8e942aaeb63a
