I’m so excited to welcome Tom Ryan to the site today to reveal the trailer of Keep This to Yourself, a totally twisted gay YA thriller publishing by Albert Whitman on May 21, 2019! If you love books that keep you guessing all the way til’ the end, enjoy having your mind completely blown by this debut. Here are the details:
It’s been a year since the Catalog Killer terrorized the sleepy seaside town of Camera Cove, killing four people before disappearing without a trace.
Like everyone else in town, eighteen-year-old Mac Bell is trying to put that horrible summer behind him—easier said than done since Mac’s best friend Connor was the murderer’s final victim. But when he finds a cryptic message from Connor, he’s drawn back into the search for the killer—who might not have been a random drifter after all. Now nobody—friends, neighbors, or even the sexy stranger with his own connection to the case—is beyond suspicion. Sensing that someone is following his every move, Mac struggles to come to terms with his true feelings towards Connor while scrambling to uncover the truth.
Preorder: Amazon | Amazon Canada| Indiebound | Barnes and Noble | Indigo/ Chapters
And now, I’ll give Tom the floor so he can reveal the trailer and share all about his awesome preorder giveaway!
I’m so excited to be here to reveal the book trailer for Keep This to Yourself, along with some exciting details about the pre-order giveaway that we’ve had in the works for the past couple of months. Thank you so much to LGBTQ Reads for giving me the space to scream about this!
Keep This to Yourself has a new release date of May 21st, just over a month away. I’ve been so happy with the early reviews, which included my very first star, from Kirkus! They called Keep This to Yourself “breathtakingly chilling…eerie and wholly immersive…A tightly plotted mystery.”
Anyone who pre-orders by May 20th (US/Canada) will receive a swag package which includes a KTTY bookmark, signed bookplate, and a “Welcome to Camera Cove” postcard. www.keepthistoyourselfbook.com
For weeks I’ve also been teasing details of an extra-special pre-order gift, and I’m thrilled to finally announce details of that today!
First, some background: when I was young I was obsessed with mysteries, from the complete sets of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew that kept me occupied during an extended stay in the children’s wing of my local hospital, to the Agatha Christie classics that I’d inhale during long, lazy summer afternoons.
As a teen, my interests shifted to thrillers; I made my way through the unbearably creepy Lois Duncan mysteries that were stocked in my small town school library, and then moved on to campy, gruesome R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike novels, filled with morally compromised, neon-clad teenagers who invariably found themselves up against unspeakable evils.
Today I still love mysteries and thrillers of all sorts, but when I finally sat down to write one of my own, it was the breathlessly earnest, deliriously creepy teenage thrillers that I’d loved in my youth that were at the front of my mind – with one big difference. In the 80s and 90s, there were no queer teens in the pages of the books that I read, but these days, thankfully, that’s no longer the case. In many ways, Keep This to Yourself is a tip of the hat to the trashy teen thrillers of my high school days, with an LGBTQ twist.
As I discussed marketing plans with the team at Albert Whitman, those garish, saturated, beautiful covers from my youth came back to me, and I had an idea: would it be possible to commission an artist to illustrate a scene from Keep This to Yourself through a vintage lens, an illustration that would pay homage to the classics of the genre, while re-imagining and re-envisioning them to include LGBTQ representation?
To my delight, Albert Whitman loved the idea, and asked me to come up with a list of artists who might fit the bill. I did some digging, and asked twitter for recommendations, and I quickly settled on a fantastic short-list. I’m here to tell you, there is immeasurable queer talent in the world, but at the end of the day one artist was always at the very top of my list…
I am SO thrilled to announce that the absolutely incredible comics artist and illustrator Cat Staggs is creating an original illustration based on a scene from Keep This to Yourself, in the style of the great YA thrillers from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Cat’s vintage aesthetic, the projects that she chooses to work on, and above all her raw talent, genuinely dazzled me from the minute I discovered her work. I’m still pinching myself that she agreed to work on this project. You can explore Cat’s amazing talent at her website: www.catstaggs.com
We’ll be revealing Cat’s artwork very early in May. For those who are interested in pre-ordering, you can find details, including buy links and forms to fill out if you’ve either pre-ordered, or requested a your local library, here: www.keepthistoyourselfbook.com
I’m so excited to reveal Cat’s work in a few weeks. In the meantime, here’s the official book trailer for Keep This to Yourself!
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Tom Ryan is the author of several books for young readers. He has been nominated for the White Pine Award, the Stellar Award and the Hackmatack Award, and two of his books were Junior Library Guild selections. Two of his young adult novels, Way to Go and Tag Along, were chosen for the ALA Rainbow List, in 2013 and 2014. He was a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction. Tom, his husband and their dog currently divide their time between Ontario and Nova Scotia.
