Organizing your poems into Collections

Overview

A collection is a named group of your own poems on GS Poetry — a way to gather related work so readers can browse it together instead of scrolling your whole catalog. Think “Love poems,” “Winter 2026,” or “Spoken word.” A poem can live in more than one collection at once, and adding a poem to a collection never moves, changes, or re-publishes the original.

Public collections are free and unlimited. GS Pro adds four extras: making a collection private (only you, and the people you share it with, can see it), sharing a private collection, a cover photo on each collection, and arranging the poems in your own order. Everything else — creating, editing, adding and removing poems, and deleting — is free for everyone.

Where your collections live

Collections have two doors, and both show the same thing:

• Profile menu → My Collections. Click your avatar at the top-right and choose My Collections.
• The Collections tab on your profile. It sits alongside Poems and Photos. Anyone visiting your profile sees this tab too — but they only ever see your public collections, and only ones that already hold at least one poem.

With GS Pro, your collections show as a shelf of covers (four across on a computer, two on a phone). On a free account they show as a tidy list, with one small note that covers come with GS Pro. You can close that note and it stays closed.

Create a collection

1. Open My Collections and click New Collection.
2. Collection Name — required, up to 120 characters.
3. Description — optional, up to 2,000 characters: a sentence about what ties the poems together.
4. Cover Photo (GS Pro) — optional. See Add a cover photo below.
5. Who Can See It — choose Public — anyone can view (free) or Only me (private). Private is a GS Pro feature; on a free account that option is shown but grayed out.
6. Click Create Collection.

You can also start one on the fly — from the Add to collections section in the poem composer, or from the Add to Collection control on any of your published poems.

Add poems to a collection

There are four ways to put a poem into a collection:

• While writing a poem — in the composer, the Add to collections section lets you tick any of your collections (or create a new one). The poem goes into them the moment you publish.
• From a published poem — open your poem and use Add to Collection.
• From the collection itself — open the collection and click Add Poems.
• From the collection card — on the Collections tab, open the ··· menu on a collection’s card and choose Add Poems.

The last two open the same picker. It shows your published poems 100 at a time, with a Show more poems button for the rest, and a search box that looks through all of them by title. Drafts aren’t shown, and poems already in the collection are left out. Tick the ones you want and click Add.

The same poem can sit in as many collections as you like.

The order of poems in a collection

Poems show in the order you added them: the first poem you added comes first, and each new one goes to the end.

With GS Pro you can arrange them however you like:

1. Open the collection. Once it holds more than one poem, a Drag poems to reorder hint appears and each poem card shows a grip handle.
2. Drag a poem card by its grip and drop it where you want it. The card you’re moving fades slightly, and a dashed outline shows where it will land.
3. No mouse? Press Tab to reach a poem’s grip, then use the arrow keys to move it one place at a time, or Home and End to send it to the start or the end. Each move is read out for screen readers.

The new order saves by itself — there’s no Save button. If a save ever fails, the order snaps back and you’ll see a short message.

On a free account the poems stay in the order you added them, and you’ll see a note that custom ordering is a GS Pro feature.

Add a cover photo (GS Pro)

A cover photo sits at the top of the collection and on its card in your shelf. A collection without one shows a soft folder tile instead.

1. On the collection’s card, open the ··· menu and choose Add Cover (or Change Cover) — or choose Edit Collection.
2. In Cover Photo, choose a photo. You’ll see a small preview with its size, and Change and Remove beside it.
3. Click Save Changes.

What works best: a JPG, PNG or WebP photo, up to 10 MB. The best size is 1600 × 1000 pixels; the smallest we accept is 800 × 500.

Every cover is checked before it appears, and any location data hidden inside the photo is removed. If a photo isn’t allowed, you’ll be asked to choose another. If a photo doesn’t upload, the rest of your changes are still saved — just add the photo again.

To take a cover off, open Edit Collection, click Remove beside the photo, and save.

Share a private collection (GS Pro)

A private collection is hidden from everyone but you. When you want someone to read it, open the collection, use the ··· menu at the top-right and choose Share Privately. There are two ways to share, and you can use both:

• Share with poets. Search for a poet by username and click their name. That’s it — there’s no separate Share button. You’ll see a note that they can now see the collection, and they get a notification with a link to it. They need to be signed in to open it. You can share one collection with up to 100 poets, and click the × beside a name to stop sharing with them.
• Share link. Click Create Share Link, then Copy Link and send it however you like. Anyone with the link can read the collection, even without an account. If a link ends up somewhere you didn’t intend, click Regenerate: you get a new link and the old one stops working straight away.

Sharing never makes a collection public. It stays off your profile, and only the people you chose (or who hold the link) can open it. Share Privately only appears on private collections — a public one can already be read by anyone.

Edit a collection

You can rename a collection, rewrite its description, change its cover, or switch it between public and private at any time:

1. On the collection’s card, open the ··· menu and choose Edit Collection — or open the collection and use the ··· menu at the top-right.
2. Change the name, description, cover, or who can see it.
3. Click Save Changes. The window closes and your changes are saved.

Only you manage a collection

Adding, removing, reordering, editing, sharing, and deleting are visible to you, the author, only. A reader viewing your collection just sees the poems — there are no controls on their side, and no one else can change your collection.

Remove a poem vs. delete the collection

These are two different actions, and neither one deletes a poem:

• Remove a poem from a collection — open the collection and click the trash icon on that poem’s card. It leaves the collection but stays published; you’ll still find it under My Poems, and it stays in any other collections it belongs to.
• Delete the whole collection — removes the collection (the grouping), not the poems in it. See below.

Delete a collection

1. On the collection’s card, open the ··· menu and choose Delete Collection — or open the collection and use the ··· menu at the top-right.
2. Confirm in the window. It reminds you that your poems are not deleted — they’re just removed from this collection.

Deleting a collection only removes the grouping. Every poem that was in it stays published and untouched.

Who can see your collections

• Public collections appear on your profile’s Collections tab for anyone who can see your profile, and each has its own page you can link to.
• Private collections (GS Pro) are visible to you, plus anyone you share them with.
• Empty collections are hidden from visitors — a collection needs at least one poem before it shows to others. You still see your own empty ones (marked “0 poems”) so you can fill, edit, or delete them.
• A poem’s own visibility still applies inside a collection: a public collection can contain a Followers-Only or Private poem, and only the people allowed to see that poem will see it there.

If GS Pro ends

Nothing is deleted, and you stay in control of everything you made:

• Private collections stay private. You can still rename them, rewrite them, share them, delete them, or make them public. What you can’t do is make a public collection private again until you renew.
• Your covers are kept, not deleted. Your collections show as a list for now, and every cover comes back the moment you renew.
• Your custom order stays as you left it. You just can’t move poems around again until you renew.

When a poet shares a collection with you

You’ll get a notification saying who shared it and what it’s called. Click it to open the collection. You need to be signed in as yourself to see it. If you’d rather not get these, switch off Shared With You in your notification settings.

If someone sends you a share link instead, just open it — no account needed.

If something goes wrong

• I can’t choose “Only me.” Private collections are a GS Pro feature; public collections are free and unlimited.
• I can’t reorder. Custom ordering is a GS Pro feature, and it only turns on once a collection holds more than one poem. Free collections show poems in the order you added them.
• I can’t find Share Privately. It only appears on private collections. A public collection can already be read by anyone, so just send its address.
• My cover photo was turned down. Check it’s a JPG, PNG or WebP, under 10 MB and at least 800 × 500 pixels. If it still won’t take, choose a different photo.
• My new collection isn’t on my profile for others. It’s either private or empty — add a poem and make it public and it’ll appear.
• A poem I removed is gone from the list. Removing only takes it out of that collection; the poem is still published under My Poems.

Where to go next

Learn how poem visibility decides who can see each poem, or see what else GS Pro adds. Still stuck? Contact support.