Barbara Gregorich's Blog

Part of the process of having a book published, be it traditionally or self-published, is to have beta readers for the manuscript. A beta reader is one who reads the “finished” manuscript and comments on it in terms of character, plot, pace, etc. A beta reader is not a proofreader, nor is she/he responsible for grammar and the like. A beta reader’s job is to read as if the manuscript were a book they picked up to read: and then to react as if they were reading that book. In other words, what ple...

Several of the people who reviewed my 2024 science-fiction/political-fiction novel, Exit Velocity, compared it to Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. I had read Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy and think very highly of her and her writing. But I had never read Parable.

For at least the first year after Exit Velocity was published, I was very busy marketing it, which meant I had little time to read. This year, however, I finally got around to reading Parable of the Sower. I really, reall...

In speaking of connectors I’m not talking about influencers: I’m talking about conjunctions — words which show relationships between things.

I’ve never thought much about these words (also, however, because, and, but) because I’ve been using them since maybe third or fourth grade, both in speech and writing. In the past I’ve written about the importance of these words in writing: they help orient the reader to what is happening, why, and where. Connectors can show relationships, add understan...

CONvergence, held in Minneapolis, is a convention for science fiction and fantasy fans in all media. It began in 1999 and has been going strong since. 

Some time in November of 2024, maybe after attending the WindyCon50 (which I wrote about in Windycon 50: A Celebration), I signed up to attend the even larger CONvergence. The reason I was attending both was to introduce fans to my new political-fiction/science-fiction novel, Exit Velocity, and to sell copies at a vendor’s table. The attendanc...

In a previous blog post, “Rediscovering Science Fiction,” I wrote about how and why I returned to reading science fiction. In this post I’ll talk about themes I’m discerning as I read. There are, I’m learning, more themes than one can fire a laser gun at. Rather than call them themes, however, I’m going to call them subgenres. A theme is what a work of literature is about: justice, revenge, power-seeking, etc. A subgenre is a smaller category within a larger one. Within the large category of Sci...

Up until 2021 I never had an author newsletter. I started one early in 2021 in order to help publicize The F Words, which was scheduled for September 2021 publication. This newsletter was hosted on my Authors Guild web site. I published it twice a month, on the 1st and 15th, though now and then I put out a special issue, and now and then I was on vacation and put out no issues.

But in April of this year, 2025, just as I was gearing up to participate in five panel discussions at CONvergence Sc...

My two most recent novels are The F Words (City of Light Publishing, 2021) and Exit Velocity (Philbar/BookBaby, 2024). While The F Words was published by an indie publisher that has been around since 2006, I published Exit Velocity on my own, through BookBaby. I usually self-publish on KDP, but this time around I wanted to try something different.

For both novels I worked hard at publicity, and I tried especially hard to arrange bookstore events. For The F Words I drove to perhaps 20 book...

When I published Exit Velocity last year I had to choose a category for it, so that bookstores would know where to place it. This pertains to online bookstores as well as brick-and-mortar bookstores. I wanted to choose the category of “social justice,” but there was no such choice on BookBaby or Amazon. Because I couldn’t choose “social justice,” I then tried to determine whether I should choose “political fiction” or “science fiction.”

Political fiction usually directly criticizes an existi...

In the different ways I use to publicize my books (blogs, newsletters, Facebook, other social media), YouTube videos are relatively new to me. I started Facebook in 2010, blogs in 2014, newsletters in early 2021, and videos later in 2021.

I started making videos specifically to publicize The F Words, which was published in September of 2021. Once I started, my goal was to create one video a month. But I have not succeeded. In 2021 I created four videos; in 2022 I created five. Then, in 2023, ...

Writers, especially writers who publish their books independently, need to spend a lot of time marketing. That’s because the US is glutted with books: three million new titles published each year. How is a potential reader to know of a book unless they hear about it somewhere? Marketing is necessary.

I’ve been marketing Exit Velocity (and, at the same time, my other books) in many different ways. But one way that I never got around to trying (because I was busy with other ways!) was marke...