This is such a wonderful article, Kathy. One other tip that I’d like to add is for folks to pay attention to the “subtitle” and “description”. Medium sets these automatically but they can be customized as well. The subtitle is visible on the Medium home pages on the phone/website under the title and also when shared on Facebook etc.

Sometimes Medium doesn’t do a very good job, so it’s best to check them before publishing. Like it or not, people go through a mental process before deciding to click through to your poem and unless they really like you, just your name will not be enough. The subtitle is an input into that decision making process. This is more important for fiction than poetry as folks usually expect the text to be the first few lines of a poem. But I especially pay attention to them for haikus because Medium reveals the full poem in the subtitle. I personally don’t like that (it removed any need for readers to click through) and always amend it to hide the last line. If folks like the first twelve teaser syllables, they can click to visit the poem page and read the last five! :-)