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 any public 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 any public 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, any public poem of yours rides the clearly labeled Boosted slots for 7 days. A poem at least 30 days old can also take a shorter 2-day boost for 15 credits.
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.
Boosted poems also have their own tab on Discover. It is labeled Boosted and kept apart from Trending and the other merit-based tabs, so a reader always knows which poems are paid placement.
Where the button is: open the poem’s own page and use the Boost box beside it, or go to your profile and look under each cover in the Highlighted Poems row for the Boost button. Either one opens a pop-up showing your credit balance, where you choose 7 days or, for a poem at least 30 days old, 2 days. Confirm there to spend the credits. Only public poems can be boosted.
While it runs: the poem shows Boosted · 5d left (counting down), and it appears in the Boosted Right Now section on your profile. To stop a 7-day boost early, tap End Boost on that line and confirm. Credits are not refunded. A 2-day boost can’t be ended early.
- Boosting is open to everyone with credits — it’s not a GS Pro perk.
- The poem only needs to be Public. It doesn’t have to be highlighted.
- One boost per poem at a time; when it ends, you can boost it again.
Seeing how your boost is doing
Every boost you are running has a How’s it doing? link: under the poem in Boosted Right Now on your profile, and beside the Boosted line under a highlighted poem. Only you see it. It opens a pop-up with four numbers, counted while the boost runs:
- Times shown: how often the poem appeared in a Boosted slot.
- People reached: how many different readers saw it.
- Times each: on average, how often each of those readers saw it.
- Clicks to read: how many times someone opened the poem from a Boosted slot.
A new boost shows Nothing counted yet for a little while; numbers appear as readers see it. These numbers are free for everyone. The Compare All Boosts button in the pop-up opens Boost Performance, which lines up every boost you have run side by side. That comparison is a GS Pro feature: without GS Pro the button is grayed out and the pop-up shows an Upgrade link instead.
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 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, tap End Boost under the poem: 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.