Improbable Press Blog — Atlin Merrick

By Atlin Merrick EVERYONE LOVES CRYPTIDS! I’m sorry-not-sorry for yelling at you. Except— Everyone loves a cryptid! —that. That's the conclusion I come to after we closed our call for submissions for what will be our anthology Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging. Because for that single anthology we got 450 stories. And that's a slightly conservative count since many of the emails contain more than one story and do you know why? You Love Cryptids Over the five months of the open call we received submissions daily, story after story of cryptids both 'known' – hello Jersey devil, Mothman, and mermaid!...

By Atlin Merrick A thousand words a day.One thousand words a day.A thousand every day every day one thousand. That. There. The rule I lived by for two years. Several years ago, in an effort to become a better writer, I promised myself I'd write a thousand words a day for a year. When that went well, I continued on into two years and by early year three… …I was… …sometimes… …………falling behind. Because by year three I'd become deeply involved with fandom, going to meetups and conventions, I'd moved countries, and I'd started a degree program. So a thousand...

By Atlin Merrick Got a book? Then you want to be online to help promote it, whether that's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or a website. While you can stick to social media-only for promotion, if you decide to create a website – a good long-term investment in your writing self – here are a few ideas on how to do it for free or for cheap. Tumblr For the Win – Maybe The cheapest and easiest way to create a website is to start with Tumblr –  if you're already using it. Something you already know will make the process easier,...

By Atlin Merrick There are a lot of things to do to help promote your book – and here are 11 book promo ideas – but there are a few things you want to not do, including: Don't create a Goodreads page for your book Goodreads is owned by Amazon, and once your book is listed there by your publisher, Amazon automatically generates a Goodreads page for your book. So if you create one before Amazon you will end up with two pages. If you have no book page after a few days or a week after your book is out...

By Atlin Merrick A quick note today and that's this: Know your publisher. I don't mean know the actual people, I don't even mean know all about what they do and when they started, I mean know what sort of publisher they are. I follow and get followed by other publishers and editors on Twitter and I usually follow back, but lately I've stopped doing that automatically, instead seeing who I'm following. This is how I learned that some subsidy presses are calling themselves independent publishers. But they're not. Not in the way that term is traditionally used. Independent Publisher...