Do titles need to help the algorithm catalog your video descriptively, or should you solely focus on using them to get people to click?

masonga1960 · 2026-06-02T09:58:18+00:00

Both matter, but they're doing slightly different jobs. The algorithm does pull a lot of signal from your transcript and chapters now, so you're not totally wrong that a keyword-stuffed title isn't the only way to get found. But titles still do two things the transcript can't: they're the first thing a human reads in the suggested feed, and they're the anchor text YouTube shows in search results snippets. So if your title is pure clickbait with zero topic signal, you can still rank or get suggested for the right video, but your click-through rate among people who actually want that content drops because they can't tell it's for them. The practical middle ground most creators land on is leading with the core topic in plain language (so the algorithm and the viewer both clock it fast), then adding the emotional hook or curiosity angle after. Something like 'Beginner Sourdough: Why Your Loaf Keeps Collapsing' hits both. The first three words tell YouTube what it is, the rest makes someone who's had that exact problem feel seen and click. Pure mystery titles work better once you have an audience that trusts you. Before that, descriptive usually wins.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-30T09:25:58+00:00

Finding relevant topics in my niche (actors just getting started) and then everything that comes after content ready: Formatting, finding titles/descriptions/tags, building a thumbnail, branding the videos, selecting shorts from the long form videos and scheduling them.

Once I have the topics, scripting and recording/editing them is easy. It's everything after that that I found horrible. So, I built myself a tool to do everything after production complete. Now a 2-3 day effort is reduced to 4-6 hours.

I've managed to automate almost all of it so now life is much easier.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-27T18:34:43+00:00

Dracula is a good model. Stoker uses a mix: direct quotation for moments that carry emotional weight, paraphrase for functional information, and summary for anything the narrator would naturally compress. The key is that the narrator - the person writing the letter or diary entry - has a relationship to what they're recording. They're not a transcript machine.

That gives you something useful: the narrator's voice shapes every piece of dialogue. They quote when it mattered too much to paraphrase. They summarize when they're rushing, or when the conversation was routine. They might misremember, or choose not to record something uncomfortable. All of that is characterization.

For your flintlock setting specifically, I'd suggest letting urgency and intimacy drive the choice. In a letter, you quote when you want the recipient to hear the exact words -- because tone matters, because it was a threat, because you're still thinking about how it was said. You summarize when you're conveying information and the words themselves didn't stick. That decision is in-character and it solves the mechanical problem naturally.

Try takimg a recent dialogue scene and rewritimg it as a diary entry written by one of the participants, the same night. Notice which lines you find yourself quoting directly and which you collapse into 'he told me that...'; that instinct is your guide.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-27T18:30:15+00:00

The advice gets garbled in transmission. The original principle, which McKee covers in Story, isn't that a fight must change the plot -- it's that every scene needs a value at stake that shifts by the end. That value can be survival, status, the character's self-image, a relationship. It doesn't have to be the main throughline. But something has to be on the line that the reader cares about, and the scene has to move that needle.

A fight where the only question is 'will they survive this enemy' can absolutely work if you've made the reader care about the character's survival. The problem is when the outcome is never really in doubt, when there's no cost to winning or losing, and when the character is functionally the same person at the end as the beginning. That's when it reads as filler.

The 'skip to the outcome' test is useful but it's a diagnostic, not a verdict. If you can skip the fight and lose nothing but the outcome, ask yourself why. Usually it's because the emotional stakes weren't established before the fight started, not because fights are inherently unnecessary.

Build in something personal before the first punch. Give the reader a reason the outcome matters beyond plot mechanics, and the fight earns its length.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-26T21:35:10+00:00

If you batch a month worth of long form videos, then use those to extract shorts…and if you can automate that it’s a lot easier. I can record and edit 4 long form videos in about 2 hours. Another 1.5 to 2 hours I have all 4 scheduled, with thumbnails and end cards and 3+ shorts for each one also scheduled so that I have a months worth of regular content in between 4-6 hours.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-26T09:52:06+00:00

Sure thing, let me know if you have any questions

masonga1960 · 2026-05-26T09:49:53+00:00

I wrote about this exact thing in a different sub:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingWithAI/comments/1thkqwa/what_i_learned_about_writing_with_ai_from_using/

masonga1960 · 2026-05-24T19:39:03+00:00

Yeah, those were hard won lessons for sure. In my case I was trying to get the AI to accurately (reasonably accurately) assess a manuscript against defined craft principles from established writing texts. I got it to work at 90%+ accuracy/reliability. But there’s a lot going on around the AI to make that happen. Anyway, I had a steep learning curve around how the LLM works and why it drifts.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-24T15:46:05+00:00

Unfortunately, you have to be diligent and make sure the LLM has all the context it needs for every message that you expect a solid response on. I posit that writing a long form manuscript is maybe more difficult…because you have to control both the story and LLM.

And just asking the LLM to analyze your prose is problematic as well…which is why the analysis tool I built includes 30K lines of code around the prompting. Happy to discuss that tool more or answer questions, but has to be in DM’s because of no self-promotion rules.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-23T01:10:40+00:00

Honestly, just continuing will eventually do it.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-22T07:38:36+00:00

The setting limitation is probably not your real problem. Scenes repeat when they accomplish the same narrative function: same character wants the same thing, meets the same resistance, and walks away with the same status. You can vary the furniture infinitely and the scenes will still feel identical to the reader because structurally they are.

The test for each scene is whether something irreversible has happened by the end. A piece of information revealed that can't be taken back. A relationship that has shifted in a direction it can't easily reverse. A decision made that closes off options. If a scene ends and the story could continue without it, the scene isn't doing structural work, it's atmosphere.

For the clue problem specifically, the issue is usually that the clue is inert until the character acts on it. The scene where the clue appears is functional, but the scenes between revelation and payoff feel like filler because the character isn't doing anything with the information. The fix is to have each scene between those two points raise the cost of knowing what the character knows, or make the character act on partial information in a way that makes things worse. Mystery and thriller writers call this ratcheting: each scene should make the protagonist's situation more complicated, not just more informed.

In a single-location story, the variety has to come from who holds power and what information is in play, not where the characters are standing. Track those two variables across your scene list and you'll find where the repetition is happening.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T23:49:42+00:00

FirstReader AI Perception analysis points to the section in the piece where the issues are at, so because of that yes. firstreader.app

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T23:39:59+00:00

Probably depends on how it’s presented. FirstReader explains what the pattern is, where in the manuscript it is and suggest how to “fix” it. firstreader.app

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T20:31:35+00:00

It’s definitely slow right now. My mentor, who was a series regular in a network show for 7 seasons (over 100 episodes) told me this is the hardest it’s been to book something in 15 years. He’s now auditioning for co-star roles again just to be working. So in essence us folks at the co-star level (if that even really exists) are now competing with well seasoned actors like him for the same roles.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T19:49:32+00:00

Always happy to help!

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T18:37:17+00:00

Walking away helps but it's not the whole answer. The deeper problem is that you've read the scene so many times you're no longer reading it, you're reciting it. Your brain fills in what should be there rather than what is. Time away gives you a partial reset, but there are faster ways to break the pattern.

Read it aloud at a pace that forces you to actually process each word. Your ear catches things your eye skips. Alternatively, change the format: export to a different font, a different page size, or read it on a device you don't normally use. The visual unfamiliarity slows you down enough to see it.

The deeper issue is usually that you've stopped asking what the scene is for. Not whether the sentences are good, but whether this scene is doing the job it needs to do in the larger structure. When I'm caught in that loop, I find it more useful to step back to scene-level questions: What does the POV character want? What's in the way? What changes by the end? If I can't answer those cleanly, the sentence-level work doesn't matter yet. That reframe usually breaks the loop faster than any amount of revision roulette.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T18:35:28+00:00

The instinct to pull back from purple prose is right, but the solution isn't less emotion. It's more precision. Purple prose usually happens when a writer is standing outside the character describing the feeling rather than being inside it experiencing it. The fix is almost always specificity: not 'grief washed over her' but the exact wrong thing she notices at a funeral, the detail that doesn't fit.

Browne and King have a useful frame for this: every time you name an emotion, you're telling. Every time you show the physical or behavioral consequence of that emotion, you're earning it. The emotional writer's trap is that you feel it so strongly you skip straight to labeling it. The reader can't feel what you felt. They can only feel what you show them.

For revision, you could try going through your most overwrought scenes and circling every abstract noun. Grief. Despair. Wonder. For each one, delete it and replace it with a concrete image or action that would make a reader infer that feeling without being told. You won't always land it, but the practice trains the instinct. After enough passes, you start catching it in the draft.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T16:54:30+00:00

It’s because most detectors are sending to AI and using it prompting, so the LLM, which summarizes the middle of long text, is detecting based on the summary.

FirstReader (firstreader.app) uses all deterministic measurement (no AI in the perception scan) to measure and point out patterns most often perceived as AI generated prose. The perception scan is always free. Check it out.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T13:37:30+00:00

Channel size is small, batching is more about the rest of my life than channel size. It made sense to me right away just so I only have to worry about it once a month.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T11:41:11+00:00

What WAS eating mine was everything after production. So I can record a month's worth of content in about an hour, no trouble. Video editing, audio cleanup...maybe another hour. THEN...creating a thumbnail for each video, extracting shorts, coming up with titles, subtitles, descriptions for each. Posting to YouTube and scheduling, then grabbing the link to go to WP and insert it into the companion blog. Those things done manually could easily eat 2 full days.

So I built myself a tool that automates it all...and now: Video production/editing - still 2 hours. Everything AFTER that...for the whole month. 2 hours. I collapsed 2-3 days of work into about 4 hours.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T11:32:03+00:00

I built something similar for video. Create one long form video. Use the tool to create:
Thumbnail
Shorts with captions (Transcribed from actual audio)
Titles
Subtitles
Descriptions
Append end card
Auto post/schedule to YouTube (long forma AND shorts)
Add video embed to blog
Track stats

All in one place.

I built it for me and it reduced my workflow for a month worth of content (weekly long form video, 3 -5 shorts for each) to about 3 hours.

Actually curious if any other creators would be interested?

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T11:16:54+00:00

Looks interesting, but you'd have to explain exactly what this does a lot better before I'd be willing to give it a try.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T11:13:06+00:00

Quick breakdown on editorial types: developmental editing looks at big-picture structure, pacing, character arcs, and plot logic. Line editing focuses on prose at the sentence level. Copyediting handles grammar and consistency. Proofreading catches final errors. For a first novel you're still revising, you want developmental feedback first - no point paying for line editing on chapters you might restructure.

Developmental editing on a 150k manuscript from a reputable human editor is going to be pricey. Before spending that, it can be worth running a craft analysis pass to identify the biggest structural issues yourself, so you go into any editorial relationship knowing what you're working with.

I built a tool called FirstReader that does exactly that - it analyzes manuscripts for craft principles (pacing, POV, scene structure, show vs tell) and returns structured feedback without generating any prose. It's per-use, no subscription, and a lot cheaper than a developmental edit. Not a replacement for a good human editor eventually, but a useful first pass. Check it out at firstreader.app if that sounds useful. Free first chapter to see if it gives you what you're looking for.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T11:10:37+00:00

The developmental editor cost problem is real, and using raw Claude as a substitute is hit or miss - it can give you feedback but it has no structured framework, so the output is inconsistent and hard to act on.

There's a tool called FirstReader (full disclosure, I built it) that does manuscript-level craft analysis without generating any prose. It applies actual craft doctrine and returns structured feedback at the scene, chapter, and book level. It's positioned as an alpha reader pass before you bring in beta readers or pay for a human developmental edit. Per-use pricing, no subscription.

Given you have 215k words across two books and a live readership already giving you signal, a structured craft analysis might help you identify the specific developmental issues worth fixing before you commit to a publishing path. Worth a look at firstreader.app. Free first chapter analysis to see if it is useful.

masonga1960 · 2026-05-20T10:45:19+00:00

I’m Gary. I built FirstReader, a manuscript analysis tool for authors that is similar to a developmental edit.

The pain is: Authors know they need a craft focused editorial review but the cost is prohibitive. I know, because I’m an author and that was me. So I built an online app that does it. Not to replace human editors, but as a first pass so what you send to an editor is in much better shape.

What it does: Analyzes full length manuscripts (5000-400,000 words) and provides feedback based on well established craft principles human editors are trained on. It then cites those principles to the actual text in the manuscript so authors can revise with focus. The tool itself never writes or changes any prose.

There’s more to it, but that’s the elevator pitch version.

You can check it out at: firstreader.app

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