Improbable Press Blog

Okay, you’ve signed a contract with a small press and you’re doing the butt-wiggle dance of joy. You probably sent your book to a lot publishers and at last your work found a home. Whether you’re a new writer or have been published before, it’s a relief to know you’ve found someone else who loves your work as much as you do. And—WAIT! Screeching To a Halt: Loving Small Presses That! It’s that I want to bold and italicize:         We love your book, too. I can nearly 100% guarantee that that’s why any small press anywhere wants to publish...

By Sebastian Jack Hi! My name is Sebastian Jack, I’m a bilateral, above-knee amputee, and I use a wheelchair full-time. 15% of the world’s population (one billion people!) live with some form of disability. One fifth of them (between 110 – 190 million people) experience significant or profound disability. So, why don’t 15% of our fictional characters have disabilities? If you’re interested in writing complex, nuanced, disabled characters, here are some tips to get you started in the right direction! First things first: What is your character’s disability, and how did they acquire it? Do they have an amputation? If...

A writer recently asked what we mean by 'we're editing your book,' and though we've talked about the overall book editing process on this blog, we never covered the nitty gritty of how the editing process goes. We're about to do that right now. How We Edit Your Book You've sent your completed novel to us. We've never seen those words before. We're excited! Though the precise process depends on the editor, for Improbable Press, this is how we edit: While we read, we're making note of big things like 'this story starts too early… begin the book at chapter...

By Narrelle M Harris So many people expound so many rules about writing – and so much of it can be contradictory – that it’s not always easy to tell good advice from bad. Two reminders of this came my way recently. The first was a Facebook post by a writer I follow. Full of irritation at absolutist ‘rules’, he reeled out the ‘common wisdom’ writing advice, full of ‘never do this’ and ‘don’t do that’. The comments were full of people citing beloved works which broke those rules with enormous success. The second was when I read Daphne Du...

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! – and entirely...