Pride month production, publishing and procrastinations

@ Fabulosa Books

Happy Pride Month! I know it's a bit late and it's almost over, but it's been a busy month. Who decided to make it a whole month, anyway? Remember when it was just a day or a week? It's kind of exhausting when you think about it.

This month, not only did I publish my novella, Lessons in Teenage Biology, I also arranged a reading at Fabulosa Books in San Francisco with two of my pal authors, Trebor Healey and Gar McVey-Russell. That was June 24.

 

And only days before that, I completed my 40-page portion of the Bay Area Reporter's annual Pride issue. I edited 12 articles and wrote two on my own. I'll get to those in a bit.

But the big news for me was publishing Lessons in Teenage Biology. I had a good time putting it together because it's short and sweet. It's based on a short story I wrote way back in 1986 and cleaned it up and made some artistic changes but basically tried to keep the same adolescent voice going for the story which expanded to 24,000 words. 

That's a bit too much for a short story. So that's why I didn't submit it to any anthologies, because I just wanted to do it myself and experiment with some marketing techniques. 

If you heard about the book, then it may have succeeded, but I actually found that several types of recommended promotions don't exactly work right, specifically the practice of giving away your book as an advance reader copy (ARC). Two different services mostly resulted in people who didn't read it, looked at it, or gave a negative review. So enough with that.

What's really surprising as a success are Ingram's promotions that go directly to libraries and bookstores for only $150. That was the real bargain. It saved me having to buy email lists, purchase them, do a mass mailing etc. 

I had a bit of a flop with MailChimp. I sent out press release to about 200 verified press email addresses and only got about three responses for any kind of coverage.

But moving forward, I set up reading event at the local bookstore Fabulosa Books, which is the location of the late great A Different Light bookstore. In its heyday before the Internet, the staff would hand sell-books by local offers like me. And going to see an author was a big big deal.

This time around we had about 20 people show up, including some known literary authors, which was great. Three people inquired on social media if there would be a live feed. We didn't set that up and that would not have been a hassle, but it's not the point. People have come to expect that kind of convenience since the pandemic and I've done quite a few since 2020 (including one at Fabulosa with Baruch Porras-Hernandez), but not this time around.

 For my day job as the Arts Editor of the Bay Area Reporter, the entire month was full of hundreds of emails. I had to sort articles, assign writers, collect photos to crop and edit, etc. It was a lot of work, and of course our big Pride issue came out today. You can read the PDF version or all the articles on the web of course. In San Francisco, you can get a print copy. It's quite a collectible.

One of those articles that I wrote was a review of the biography of Richard Hunt, the gay Muppet performer of who died of AIDS in 1992. Jessica Max Stein's biography is a very special and touching story about the affable and funny guy who played many characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and some of Jim Hanson's films. 

You can read my review here. I'll probably post that on Goodreads and Amazon later on.

So, when the actual Pride day comes, I'm so exhausted all the rainbow stuff that I've had to process and produce and publish, that I haven't even gone to Civic Center in a few years, even though it's only a few blocks away from my home. 

It's just a big crowd of young kids, which is great, but it's just not to my taste to be enveloped by clouds of cooked meat, loud music, and drunk people. In fact, most of my friends don't even go anymore. 

We went during the earlier days in the '80s and '90s when it was a radical thing to march in the Pride parade. Specifically, my New York days where I was just coming out were pivotal. 

Well, I had been out, but I was officially out and marching up (or down) Fifth Avenue to/from the West Village and Central Park. It was quite a revolutionary exciting wonderful time. Now it's more about consumerism and an overload of drag brunches.

Not that there's anything wrong with drag brunches! There's just so much going on now in terms of the entire month being full of LGBTQ events. It's hard to keep up. But that's my job.

I hope you're going to have some fun with your friends at Pride in your city, whether watching or marching in a parade; something I did many many times with sports groups and Mikes on Bikes in years past. 

It's always fun to participate and I've done my share to participate, and encourage other people to do so.

Happy June, happy LGBTQIAetc. Happy Pride.

Lessons in Teenage Biology, in stores soon. Buy the ebook now. It's in the syllabus.

 

 It's a book! 

It's really amazing how much work goes into doing such a thing even when it's a small project. If I only knew I would have so much technology to conquer back when I wrote this story in 1986 I might not have even bothered.

 Raise a hand if you're one of those antiquated old-fashioned people who actually used a manual typewriter back in the 1980s. And then there was remembering all the events from the 1970s and trying to get it right.

What followed was the manuscript of my first long short story (I don't think I even knew what a novella was back then!), moving it around from box to box until sometime in the 1990s I decided to scan it. I only had a photocopy as a back up. I think I had to wait until they were scanners.

Then, with the text, I read it and re-wrote it a few times, but put it aside. Many books later, I thought I had learned all there was to learn about publishing, specifically self-publishing where you get to do all the work yourself (Yay?), make a little bit more money than a small press would pay in advance (Yay!), but not much because you don't have an army of editors, publicists and distributors, and begging for agency is off the table.

But I thought I'd learned all the tricks in the book; personal website, migrating content, layout code on my website, domain linking. But there were so many new things to try. I decided to crank up the old Mailchimp and only sent out about 100 press releases. Three replied, so far. I'm told that's a good rate. I don't know anymore.

I have yet to send out stuff other than a few social media spots. A book trailer's on its way, not that I think it leads to sales, but it's fun to do. And I know how to do it.

Then of course, is looking at a multiple series of PDF proof and making correction after correction after correction. And then you find out that the Library of Congress only sends out your control number after you've approved the final interior PDF (It's 2024909132, by the way).

Lessons in Teenage Biology, my 1970s-set novella, coming soon!

 
Lessons in Teenage Biology 

 my new novella, out May 6 (Kindle) and June 1 (paperback)

A lot can happen in two days. For Tom Mollicelli, passing out in gym class, being saved from a bully by his sister, getting drunk at a party, going camping with his straight crush, and almost ditching a speech tournament, all lead up to his first kiss from a guy. 

 

Set in a small Ohio town at the peak of the 1970s, Lessons in Teenage Biology offers a searingly honest depiction of a gay youth struggling to just get through another day or two.

 

  

“Provenzano’s gift for recreating the mindset of the American teen boy is such that this fairly typical story of a fairly typical lovelorn high school boy never falls into cliché. Most readers – queer or otherwise – will identify on some level with the adolescent angst, and revel in the sweet conclusion of this story.”

– Larry Duplechan, author of Blackbird and Movies That Made Me Gay

 

“Lessons in Teenage Biology is a delightful journey back to a small Ohio town in the late 1970s. And it enveloped my attention right away. That was my upbringing, though mine was years earlier and his classmates were more hip and aware than mine. Through Tom, we hear his thoughts about friends and high school classmates and imagined gay partners, as he navigates a world of trying to fit in, to not stick out, and to still be himself.”

– JD Doyle, author of 1981: My Gay American Road Trip

 

Lambda Literary Award-winning novelist Jim Provenzano brings a swift wit to his latest story, which is actually his first. Hand-typed on a manual typewriter in 1986, the author of seven subsequent novels and other works recently rediscovered his early novella in a box of documents, then scanned and converted the pages. While expanding the story, he retained its sense of urgent eccentricity. While fitting for the Young Adult genre, Tom’s wild two days, a somewhat autobiographical coming of age tale, will spark a nostalgic light for readers who remember teen life in the 1970s.

 

$10. Paperback

Fiction/Gay Fiction/Young Adult
ISBN-13: 979-8-218-35678-1
Ebook: 979-8-218-35680-4

 

Pre-order the ebook now at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D32F7Y3M/

 

(Booksellers and librarians; available from Ingram.)

 

"The Lost of New York" - Family history, authorial advances, and technological hindrances

I finally completed the trailer for my late uncle, John Rigney Jr.'s novel, "The Lost of New York." Yes, it was published in May 2022, but as the saying goes, better late than never.

In putting it all together, I realized there was a vast difference between my uncle's ability to hand-type his novel, as well as other stories, never knowing if they'd ever be published. Compare that to my spending a few hours on an upgraded video editing application to try to capture the tone and spirit of his book. This is after spending months scanning, editing and twice formatting it in book form!

If you didn't know the background of this book, you can read more on my website, which talks more about uncle Butch's story, and how he managed to assemble a novel, a few short stories, and parts of an incomplete novel. At the time he was dealing with drug addiction, unemployment, and being apparently shipped off to Alaska for a government job in lieu of a federal prison sentence.

So how did he manage to save all these pages with no such thing as a photocopier in the late 1950s and early '60s? He must've held onto it dearly. Did he own a typewriter? I don't know how he managed to do all this. His history is kind of lost, other than stories from my mother, and remembrances of repeated stories via my brother.

But his sheer determination is what inspires me. I'm pretty sure that the writing instinct comes from my mother's side of the family, although Uncle Butch was the only one who actually got this far. The fact that he'll never know that I actually ended up publishing his book –and made a few editorial changes, but basically tried to get the spirit of it and clean it up a lot– might amuse him.

In putting together the trailer, I was noting how technological advances have made it so much easier to put together a book and promote it. I'm part of the last generation that spans these two eras, the hand-typed manuscript, which I actually did a few times before I had a computer in the 1980s, to the now-commonplace ebook and audiobook. And then we have artificial intelligence that's basically rewriting books in a bootleg style and robots are selling them online.

For my technological advances over the years, I've had to make changes and adjustments and adapt. I have a website. I have a blog. I have social media. I've made video trailers for almost all of my books, because I can. Also, I learned all these skills after literary agents failed me, and publishers ghosted me, or were occasionally polite enough to reply with a 'No thanks.'

For Christmas, I bought myself a new Macintosh Mini after 11 years of dealing with an old one from work that was sluggish, but functional. So when I bought the new computer, I knew there would be a lot of changes to make. Specifically the video editing software, which is terrific (Filmora Wondershare; not a plug, but it actually works.

Oh, I also composed the music! I did a lot of that back in the 1980s, and fortunately the song I use totally fits the mood of Butch's book. When I composed and recorded it, we used cassette tapes, kids. The internet was not widely used by the public, and Uncle Butch manuscript sat hidden in a box in my parents' house in the attic.

Anyway, there are a lot of adjustments to make the basic things; moving text, old video, as well as lots of new doodads and ways to move things around. So it's a good thing that I waited to make this trailer, because there were certain things I wanted to do that we're unable to do in the previous version. And in Uncle Butch's time, I don't think there was any kind of book trailer.

The downside is that with the new computer, I forgot to export my bookmarks, so my passwords for virtually every single website that I use had to be updated and changed and verified, along all that other baloney that goes along with 21st-century technology.

Not that I'm complaining. Thanks for double-checking to make sure it's actually me doing this blog post, Google!

As I share my new book trailer on the Internet, perhaps even boost it on social media here and there, I'm happy that I was able to actually get this done. I've actually made a few hundred dollars off of Uncle Butch, so thanks for that. It's basically paid for the cost of publishing, etc. Mostly, it's libraries that have purchased it, another advancement that would make Uncle Butch proud. 

I encourage you to give it a try. In paperback or e-book, it's a bargain because it's an archival document of lost era in our history, specifically, New York history and that of my family.