How to Format Your Title

A Formatting Guide

Published in

Cream Shaboogie Cock

4 min readDec 31, 2019

All stories on Cream Shaboogie Cock should have a common look and feel to the heading. Whether it’s a Feature Story, Flash Fiction, Poetry, or just a Hot Chapter or Sexy Snippet, we want to see:

A title: This is the title of your book, story, or poem.
A sub-title: In the magazine view, a reader may only see your title and sub-title, so include some click-bait words that will interest your readers. eg. “Missy’s Husband Gets to Watch”
A tag-line. Here’s where you need to get creative. You have up to 25 words to tease your readers with what they’re going to find when they start reading. Here’s some classic tag-lines from movies.

In space, no one can hear you scream (Alien, 1979)
One man’s struggle to take it easy (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986)
You’ll never go in the water again (Jaws, 1975)

Formatting

Title

This is the easiest one because every story MUST have a title. When you create a new story (click your avatar and select “New Story”), you’ll see “Title” at the top of the page in grey. Type over it with the name of the book you are advertising, or the name of the story you are presenting.

Sub-Title

This one can be tricky because sub-titles are optional on Medium. When you start typing below the title, the word will appear in Medium’s default paragraph format. That’s okay. Just type in your sub-title, highlight it, and when the format bar pops up, click the small-T.

For Sexy Snippets, append (a sexy snippet) to your sub-title.
For Hot Chapters, append (a hot chapter) to your sub-title.

This is a courtesy to let readers know they’re not opening a complete story.

Banner Image (optional)

Want to include a slim banner image above your title? This isn’t for full-size pictures; that would push the title and story off the bottom of the page, but if you use your favorite image editing software to grab your preferred sliver of the book cover or another image, it can look great at the top of the page.

There’s a trick to adding the banner image because Medium won’t let you just insert an image before the title. You need to add it lower and then drag it into place.

Insert your banner image below the sub-title to start with.
Add alternative text to the image, such as licensing details or the address of a link if you are also hyperlinking it. You must add alternative text, otherwise Medium won’t allow it as a banner image.
Drag the image above the title.
Click on the image and hit Ctrl-k to add a hyperlink. e.g. To your bookstore.
Open the (…) menu, choose Change Featured Image and select the new banner image. You must make the banner the featured image, otherwise Kicker (see below) won’t be recognised and will no longer display in Medium story lists.

Kicker (optional)

The kicker is a line of no more than 5 keywords that goes above the title. Use the same ones as in the topics when you publish the story. You can research the popularity of topics by typing them into the search bar in Medium.

Add a line above your Title
Type your keywords in ALL CAPS sepearated by spaces and pipe (|) characters.
Format the line as a subtitle. You should see it change to grey and the Kicker label will appear as per the image above.

When you publish, the kicker will appear in Medium links between the featured image and the title.

Tag Line

Format the tag-line in large-quote typeface. Type out your tag-line, highlight it, and when the format bar pops up, click the quote symbol twice. Both the quotes should show green.