Highlighting and boosting your poems
Pin your best work to your profile with highlights, schedule them to rotate on their own, and spend credits to boost a highlighted poem into more streams.
Reviewed regularly to match the current app.
Overview
GS Poetry gives you two ways to put more light on the poems you’re proudest of. Highlighting pins a poem to the featured spot on your profile, so visitors see your best work first. Boosting spends credits to carry a highlighted poem beyond your profile — into the labeled Boosted slots in the home stream people read every day, in front of readers who don’t follow you yet. Highlighting is free; boosting costs credits; and neither one touches Trending, which is always earned by real reads.
Highlighting a poem
You can highlight a poem two ways:
- From the composer — tick Highlight this poem on my profile under Additional options when you publish.
- From My Poems — open My Poems, find the poem, and choose its highlight action.
A few ground rules:
- Only Public poems can be highlighted — a highlight is for the world to see, so a followers-only or private poem can’t take the spot.
- Every poet can highlight 1 poem for free. GS Pro raises that to 4, so your profile can feature a rotating set.
- You can un-highlight at any time, on any plan — removing a highlight is never gated.
Scheduled highlights let your featured work rotate on its own. When highlighting, pick a future start (from 5 minutes to a year out), an optional end (the highlight removes itself when the window closes), or both. Set a few of these up and your profile refreshes without you lifting a finger.
Boosting a poem
A boost buys your poem extra reach. For 50 credits, a highlighted poem rides the clearly labeled Boosted slots for 7 days.
Where a boosted poem actually appears: in the home stream, the feed people scroll when they arrive. Your poem is dealt in as every fifth item, in the flow of the poems and activity a reader is already reading, rather than parked in a sidebar. It also appears in a row at the end of a poem, where someone who has just finished reading is looking for the next one, and alongside your other work on your own profile.
It reaches readers who don’t follow you. That is the point of paying: a boost is shown to the wider readership, not only to the people already subscribed to your work.
What the card looks like: your poem’s cover art fills the top of the card with the title across it and your name underneath, and the whole card carries a soft gold glow so it stands out as you scroll past. If you never set a cover, the card draws its own artwork from the poem instead, so it always has something to look at. Setting a real cover is the single biggest thing you can do to make a boost land.
It always says what it is. Every boosted card carries a visible Boosted label and a link explaining why it is being shown. We do not run unlabeled paid placement anywhere on GS Poetry, and a boost never touches Trending, which stays earned: the readers a boost delivers are excluded from the Trending calculation entirely.
Boosts are not on Discover. Discover is merit-only for everyone, signed in or not, with nothing paid on it at all.
Where the button is: go to your own profile and look at the Highlighted Poems row at the top. Under each highlighted cover there is a small rocket button. Tap it once, then tap again to confirm the spend. On a narrow phone the button shortens to just Boost to fit, so look for the rocket rather than for particular words. If the poem is already boosted, that spot shows the days remaining instead, counting down. And if there is nothing at all under a cover, that poem isn’t Public. Only public poems can be boosted.
- Boosting is open to everyone with credits — it’s not a GS Pro perk.
- The poem must already be highlighted and Public — highlight first, then boost.
- One boost per poem at a time; when the 7 days end, you can boost it again.
Short on credits? See Understanding credits for how to earn or buy them.
Gifting a boost
Love someone else’s work? You can gift a boost: spend 50 of your own credits to put another poet’s highlighted public poem into the Boosted slots for 7 days. They’re notified that a supporter boosted their poem — a concrete way to lift up a voice you believe in.
If someone gifts you a boost you would rather not have, you can end it from your own profile: the boost is yours to remove, on your own poem, at any time.
Troubleshooting
- “Highlight up to 4 poems with GS Pro.” You’ve used your free highlight. Un-highlight the current poem to swap in a different one, or upgrade to feature up to 4 at once.
- “Max 4 highlighted poems.” You’ve hit the GS Pro cap — remove one highlight to make room.
- “This poem must be public.” Change the poem’s visibility to Public first, then highlight or boost it.
- A scheduled highlight didn’t appear. At its start time the poem must still be Public and you must have a highlight slot free. If either check fails at that moment, the scheduled start is skipped — set it up again once the poem is public or a slot is open.
- My membership lapsed — what happens to my highlights? Poems you already highlighted stay highlighted, and you can always remove them. You just can’t add beyond the free limit or schedule new windows until you resubscribe.
Where to go next
Credits power boosting — see Understanding credits for earning and buying them. Not sure a poem is set to Public? See Understanding poem visibility. For everything GS Pro includes, visit GS Pro pricing.