4 Ways You Can Use Medium Lists to Share Your Favorite Stories
Organize your back catalog, create a mini-course, and more ways to curate stories that matter to you
Earlier this year, we built lists as a way to help you organize and share stories that matter to you on Medium. Your lists can be public or private, and you can organize them around whatever you like — a topic that interests you, a timely news story, a writer you love. You can also sort your own stories into subcategories to help your audience dive deeper into your work. (Those few weeks when all you could write about was NFTs? Gather those posts into a list!)
To see a writer’s lists, just click “Lists” on the top of their profile page (if they haven’t made any lists, you won’t see that option). For a complete rundown of how this feature works, head here.
Below, you’ll find just a few of the ways writers are using lists on Medium — hopefully, they’ll inspire you to create one (or several) of your own.
Show us the real you
You know those Spotify playlists on artists’ pages called, for example, “This is Taylor Swift”? They give you a curated list of an artist’s greatest hits — or just the songs that represent them best. You can do the same on Medium to help your readers get to know you better. Ria Tagulinao keeps a list called “This Is Me” for personal essays that tell the story of who she is and how she got here:
Organize your body of work
On Medium, you have the freedom to write whatever you want — and you don’t have to stick to one topic, either! You can follow your interests wherever they lead. One writer, Julio Vincent Gambuto, uses lists to organize his back catalog. There’s “The Happiness Essays” (a series of perspectives on satisfaction, power, and boundary-setting), “The Pandemic Essays,” and more. Here’s one list of every essay Gambuto has written about American politics in the 2020s:
Lisa Marie Rankin does the same — grouping stories she’s written about spirituality, personal growth, relationships, and related subjects into lists. Here’s Rankin’s list of “Goddess Wisdom,” from a series that explores how to draw inspiration from mythical goddesses:
Create a mini-course
Every day, readers turn to Medium to learn new skills — from data science to software engineering to pretty much anything you can imagine. If you’ve published stories that share knowledge or experience around a specific skill, you can group them into a list, as a service to your readers. Here’s a series of instructional posts on web scraping in Python, from Frank Andrade:
And on the less technical side, a “syllabus” on being single, from Shani Silver:
Invent your own categories
Medium editor Kate Green Tripp uses lists to group stories into unique categories you’ve probably never heard of. Reading the names of these lists gives you a window into how Kate sees the world and the kinds of stories that interest her. You’ll find stories about “Fierce Truth,” “Weird Science,” and “Love & Wisdom.” Here’s a collection of stories on “Human Patterns,” or the lesser-known ways our minds work:
Curious about lists? Here’s a step-by-step guide to using them, via our Help Center. Please experiment with them! And let us know how you make them work for you.
