I Think I Messed Up My Titles All Last Week

A good trick is to experiment with swapping your title with your subtitle

Hello everyone!

The holiday season is quickly approaching and I know that everyone is probably feeling like the walls are closing in. My kids are still young enough to fall into the magic of the holiday season, so I appreciate that, even if does create a little pressure to have a nice celebration.

The “point of no return” where Amazon can no longer get you a package before Christmas is quickly approaching, so get your shopping done!

December is kind of an odd month to evaluate in terms of how your articles are performing. People are sitting around at home looking for Christmas movies to watch for the millionth time (for some reason no streaming service carries ‘The Ref’). They’re also looking for Christmas themed writing to consume… kind of.

I’ve done a couple Christmas themed articles in the last week, but there’s a lot going on over at Medium right now. Usually, I get to this point in the month and I stop myself from checking my earnings. It’s not useful information and all it does is make you panic. You should look at comments, reads, and read ratio, but disregard earnings.

Medium changed up its stats display a few days ago. The new one looks a lot better, but mine is reading zero views for the last two days. The good news is that the views do seem to turn up in the stats section of the individual articles, so I think it’s being recorded. I expect there are just some bugs in the main display at the moment and they’ll be ironed out shortly.

This is a good example of exactly the type of thing that you can’t get too worried about. The people hard at work over at the platform have a lot on their plate and they’ll fix it (they have to get their holiday shopping done too you know).

Keeping with the Christmas theme, I did this story last week:

The Christmas Quest That Took Us Into the Realm of the Whiskered Man

That had been sitting on my desktop for a while and I dusted it off when Linda Caroll made a call for Christmas stories for On Reflection.

I won a contest a few years ago with this Christmas story, so I thought I’d try my hand at it again.

It’s been my experience that straight narrative tales (like short stories), don’t work great on Medium. However, that could be because the audience I’ve built up has an expectation for social justice themed articles. I do have a lot of success when I add narrative elements to an article, but I have less success when I just create a straight story for the purpose of entertainment.

The story has had some nice and insightful comments, but it’s not getting the response I’m accustomed to. That could also be because of the title. It’s a rather generic title that I didn’t bother to run through an analyzer to get scored. Maybe I’ll do that for everything I publish in the upcoming week and compare the difference.

Looking back, I feel I went with duds for all of the articles I published last week. I did get one boost with this one: ‘Violent Night’ Isn’t ‘Die Hard,’ It’s ‘Home Alone’.

As I look at it now, I wonder if I would have had greater success with the subtitle: ‘Does every Christmas film have to reinforce the ‘good guy with a gun’ narrative?’ That probably would have grabbed a few more eyeballs.

Zuva Seven over at An Injustice would often swap out my title for my subtitle when I submitted a draft, and she knows what she’s doing.

Titles are a peculiar animal in the modern writing marketplace. A little bit of poetry does work, but there have also been times when I’ve launched high scoring garble that has managed to perform pretty well.

It must be similar to the old psychology about making your advertisement red. There are words that float up from the depths of various feeds that compel people to click.

The big takeaway from this is that you shouldn’t beat yourself up too bad if you launch with a bad title and the article languishes. First of all, you are just speculating that you messed up. Maybe nobody is reading right now because their regular routine is all out of whack due to the holidays. You don’t know for sure, so just continue on with good practices and hope for the best.

I’d say you kind of get a mulligan for whatever happens in the next two weeks. When January 2^nd rolls around, life should start getting back to normal. Take some time to step back from the keyboard and enjoy the people around you.

Yesterday, my kids went to a friend’s house and came back with tray after tray of Christmas cookies. I’ve tried to eat them all at once because then the calories don’t count (not true). Then we snuggled in together and watched ‘Love Actually’ which I’d never seen before. The moment it started, my wife said, “Oh, it’s a British movie, I like that!”

It was a darn good movie, though I wish there’d been more resolution for the Laura Linny and Emma Thompson storylines.

It’s always a major hustle to try and make money writing, and sometimes you need a break. The holiday season is as good a time to take one because everyone is out of their routine so your assumptions and speculations are more disconnected than ever.

If there’s no money to be made, then take a nap. You need a nap. Get your batteries recharged for when things get back to normal.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is turn off your computer, go for a walk, and spend the evening with friends and family.

The next time I write it will be Christmas day, so get that shopping done and stop fretting about your stats. I might have to go and try to watch ‘The Rings of Power’ again, I’m hoping I’ll like it more the second time through, and it feels semi-Christmassy!

As always, I’m delighted to read your comments: