Why I Named My Book The Puppet King

I’ve always struggled with names.

I want them to make sense. I want them to carry symbolism, sound right,

and fit the world they belong to. In the past, I’ve spent hours trying to choose the perfect name for a character.

But this book was different.

The Puppet King is not the first completed and edited book I’ve written. Besides working as a ghostwriter and finishing many books and projects throughout my career, I’ve also written two personal novels of my own over the years.

The difference is that I never believed those books were good enough to publish.

This one is different.

The Puppet King will be my debut novel.

And strangely enough, while the book itself became deeply important to me, the character names came easily. I gave them the first names that came to mind, just so I could keep writing and stay in the flow of the story. I told myself I would come back later and change them.

But the more I wrote, the more those names became them. After a while, I couldn’t imagine them as anyone else. The characters found their names immediately. The book did not.

For a long time, it had no title at all. Nothing sounded worthy enough. Nothing felt right. But the truth is, I think I was still searching for something bigger.

I still didn’t fully understand what the story was truly about. Maybe that’s why I could never name it.

I kept calling it by the name of the creatures I had created for that world, because I didn’t yet know the deeper truth at the center of it.

But when I finished the first draft, something changed. I finally understood the story. I understood what I had been trying to say all along. And not long after that, the title came.

The Puppet King is a story about control, or more accurately, the lack of it.

It’s about power, manipulation, survival, and the roles we are forced into. It’s a dramatic story, yes, but also one where I believe many people can find something of themselves inside it.

Maybe that’s why the title took so long. It was waiting for me to understand it first.

If you’d like to follow the journey of the book and see how it’s coming together, you can find more here:

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