Editing Is Frustrating And Titles Are A Big Thing

Do you ever get frustrated by the slowness of progress when you are working on a passion project? I do, part of my problem is that I want to do too many things. I think my day job just gets in the way. My wife and I own a business together; owning a business can be hard work. We have been in a season of working a lot lately. That season has not allowed me to focus on this project much in the last month and that bugs the shit out of me.

I am still editing. I think I mentioned earlier that I like and hate editing at the same time. In one way I love finding issues in my manuscript and watching it evolve into something better. I love seeing the story develop as I flush out concepts and make tweaks. On the other hand, editing is not for the faint of heart. It takes time and is a different thought process than creating the work. I don’t know if I just thought it would be simple or what. I can be naive about things.

All that being said, I see that this editing process takes what it takes. Now, this is a little tough to swallow for someone who likes to set unrealistic expectations and timelines. I also typically think I can do things in half the time it probably takes to do them, but it’s a weird moment of optimism in my typical pessimistic outlook. Let’s go with that…

So, here I am hoping for a better month in October to get further ahead in my editing of the story.

On Another note, let’s talk about the title. I mentioned last month that the title was another rabbit hole that had to be jumped through and explored.

In doing this the way I am doing it, you have to create a title that will be searchable on Amazon when people are looking for books in your genre. In this case, we are talking about military science fiction or military zombie apocalypse science fiction. That creates some challenges. I wanted to just give it a very short title and call it Dead Station. I thought it was cool. I see all these other big authors doing that. I am not a big author and the problem with that is I do not have a large enough audience to ever drive that kind of title creation. I am just little ol’ me. I am not James S. A. Corey. I have no audience like that (Thanks for being in my audience by the way, we are small and mighty!) I have to do everything I can in order to give my story the best opportunity to show up as an option for someone to read.

There is some conventional wisdom when it comes to that. Your title should include aspects of the genre and other things people would be searching for when they are looking for something to read that interests them. A title needs to be descriptive, unique, engaging, relevant, keyword-rich, and concise.

That is a lot of stuff to think about. If you are familiar with the process of Search Engine Optimization or SEO, this is very similar in form and function. It’s also a pain in the ass. So, cool short titles are out the window. Somewhere along the way I came across the following quote and jotted it down when I was in this rabbit hole of title creation…

“A well-crafted title is not just a collection of words, but a work of art that requires creativity, skill, and finesse. But most importantly, it necessitates research and informed decisions.”

I don’t even remember where I found that quote, but it stuck in my crawl. Thanks, unnamed source!

So here we are with…

DEAD STATION A MILITARY ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE SPACE OPERA

A Humanity Shattered is the series that this book will fall in. I needed something unique and aligned with the overall theme. There are a lot of book series published on Amazon, and finding something unique was not easy for the series name.

Is it perfect, hell no. None of this is perfect, but it is fun.

The image above is one of the alternate cover ideas.