Barbara Gregorich's Blog, page 5

Exit Velocity: Cover Reveal

Confession: I have never done a cover reveal. When I first started writing, social media as we know it didn’t exist – so there was no place to post a cover reveal. And after social media existed, I didn’t do cover reveals because my publishing schedule was so tight that I had no time to consider cover reveals.

But with Exit Velocity I built a long lead-time into my publishing schedule specifically so I could place pre-sale ads in publishing venues; send the book out for review six months in a...

The F Words: Older Readers and YA

A recent Publishers Weekly article reported that 51% of YA books (those aimed at 14-18-year-olds) are bought by people between the ages of 30 and 44, and 78% of those buyers want to read the book for themselves. According to the article, YA offers adults the “opportunity to process the emotional residue of the teen years.” In addition, adult readers often want to get in touch with their teenage selves.

Even though the PW article points out a few of the possible problems with these adults read...

Clean as Bone

Recently I read a highly-praised, award-winning nonfiction book of about 550 pages. While I liked the subject matter and the information provided, I felt the book moved too slowly. It was repetitive and I felt it would have benefitted by being 100 pages shorter. 

Mark Twain once said something like: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” If you google this you’ll see that many sites call the quote an example of Twain’s humor. It is that. But it’s also pro...

Exit Velocity: Book Covers

In the world of publishing, it’s a truism that the cover sells the book. I’ve been hearing this for at least forty years — but that doesn’t make the advice stale or untrue. On the contrary, covers absolutely help sell books. The cover must convey something about the book’s genre, tone, or mood. It reflects what the book’s promise to the reader is. 

Imagine, for example, the covers of historical fiction romance novels and the covers of war/military novels. The former almost always show upper-c...

What to Subtract

Because I have a new book coming out this year (Exit Velocity on June 4, 2024), I needed to make some changes on my website. You see, the template used on my website allows me to list ten “works,” or titles, and tell something about each. 

And, as you can surmise, each of the ten slots is full. For the last several years I’ve listed the following books:

The F Words
She’s on First
Dirty Proof
Sound Proof
Charlie Chan’s Poppa: Earl Derr Biggers
Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Lots of Examples...

Exit Velocity: Choosing a Title

I don’t usually think about the titles of my books, and there’s a very important reason for that — the title comes to me along with the idea for the book. That is, they almost always arrive together. This was not the case with my current book about a mule, which I didn’t title until after the seventh draft. But it is certainly true about Dirty Proof, Sound Proof, Charlie Chan’s Poppa, Cookie the Cockatoo, Jack and Larry, Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel, The F Words, and most of my other title...

My Struggles with the Ballad

As I said in a previous blog, I wanted to write a middle grades book in ballad form, but had never written a ballad before. So, as I explained, I studied up on the ballad a bit and re-read some ballads such as “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Streets of Laredo,” and others.

And then I adjusted my chair in front of my computer and began to write the story I had in mind. 

Here’s what happened.

2017 — First Draft

The line stood firm, the line stood fresh
Robert Stroud sat tall and proud
On Castle, t...

Using BookGraphix

Ever since the launching of ChatGBT in November of 2022, I’ve been asking myself if I should learn how to use AI — not in my writing, but in my marketing. I’ve tried generating nonfiction with programs such as ChatGBT, asking it to write an article about the history of women in baseball (a subject I know a lot about), just so that I could evaluate what AI produced.

Pathetic.

The AI piece was self-contradictory as well as incorrect (it had the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League...

Keywords on Amazon

Although I didn’t know it a dozen years ago, keywords are search terms: words that somebody searching for information or, for example, a book on a particular topic would use. I thought they were just key words: words that described my book or other project. For example, I marketed my early reader Waltur Buys a Pig in Poke, with several keywords in mind: pig, bear, horse, idioms, language. These were animals that appeared in the book, and concepts within the book. But what worked back in 2005 is ...

A Strange Point of View

Point of View is one of the four pillars of fiction, the other three being Plot, Character, and Setting. What this means, I think, is that all four of these elements need to be strong within any given book. And maybe it means that they need to be equally strong —   so that the story doesn’t collapse toward a weak pillar.

For decades I never labored over point of view because it seemed to come easily to me. I usually “saw” the story being told before I began to write it, and I almost always sa...