iUniverse Author Profile: Eric Penz

I’m Eric Penz from Sammamish, Washington, just outside Seattle. The name of my novel is titled Cryptid: The Lost Legacy of Lewis & Clark. When I was younger, my parents lived outside of Glacier National Park in Montana. There’s grizzly bears there. And, it was that feeling of kind of being lower on the food chain than you’d normally feel that I’d want to give to the reader in the form of a story; so I decided to write this backwoods monster story that takes place in the northwest. My book launched. I did it at the Borders in Redmond, and was overwhelmed that there was a hundred and some books sold and you had standing room only there. A lot of it was friends and family. But, that was kind of an emotional event for me actually. I wasn’t expecting to be choked up. I was able to tap into two different audiences: one, Lewis and Clark aficionados; they have their own conferences, they have their book stores, they have their own conventions; in the same token, cryptozoology is the study of animals that are potentially real, and there’s a lot of influence in that area of the country as well so I’d go to cryptozoology conferences, Big Foot events. It’s kind of like going to a Star Trek convention. You’ve got people who are really into it and they come all dressed up and they’ve got sasquatch masks on, and all kinds of funny things.  It’s kind of a festival event.