Kenny Casanova Talks Writing Vader’s Book (Part 1)
WOHW Publishing is an independent outlet for pro wrestlers to self-publish their autobiographies.
The suicidal, homicidal, genocidal, death defying Sabu is finally opening up to the world.
The ECW icon is releasing a tell-all book with co-author Kenny Casanova, a New England Pro Wrestling Hall of Famer who toured the indie circuit from the early 1990s until the late 2000s. In 2014, Casanova launched WOHW Publishing, an independent outlet for pro wrestlers to self-publish their autobiographies and distribute them through their own websites. His first project – “Kamala Speaks” – earned roughly $60,000 from book sales, Kickstarter and GoFundMe, with all proceeds going toward Kamala’s medical bills.
Since then, WOHW Publishing has released autobiographies of Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake and notorious WWE referee Danny Davis. Casanova is currently in the process of finishing up Vader’s autobiography.
Casanova graduated from SUNY Albany with a BA in English Literature and The College of Saint Rose with a Master’s in education. He currently teaches 12th grade English, having piloted an integrated program that lets vocational students gain English credit in their trade classes like auto, culinary and carpentry.
“Sabu: Scars, Silence & Superglue” gives you a no-holds-barred look at one of the most innovative and hardcore pioneers in wrestling. With 400 pages of ECW memories, lessons from his legendary uncle The Shiek, guest passages from Rob Van Dam, Taz and other extreme peers, this autobiography is sure to be the perfect addition to any wrestling fan’s bookshelf.
You can order the book here.
You can follow Casanova on Facebook and Twitter.
Casanova spoke with The Wrestling Estate in a lengthy interview last month. The following conversation has been edited and broken into parts for easier reading. To hear the full conversation, listen to Corrigan’s Corner on Monday night at Team LeftJab Radio.
Last time we talked was right before Brutus Beefcake’s book came out in early January of last year. So how was 2018 for you?
Kenny Casanova: “Good. We put out Brutus Beefcake’s book and it did pretty well for him. There was a little heat with Hulk Hogan and the book helped squashed the heat, even though the book was the original cause for reigniting problems between them. Beefcake said I’m going to make a tell-all book, kinda ribbing him back and forth on Twitter. Then I got all these calls from the lawyer saying don’t put it out. (laughs) But it turned out there were just stories of their friendship and they got back together. It was on the Conrad and Bruce Prichard podcast and it got a bunch of sales from that, too. Toward the end of the year, Kamala’s book was mentioned on ESPN again. They brought him on Dan Le Batard’s show and made him a bunch of money, which we weren’t expecting because usually a book from 2014 doesn’t get a massive rush like that one did.
Vader’s son calls me a couple times a week and we’re going through and just changing some tiny details of his dad’s book. One of Vader’s last wishes was that his son would go over the entire book and make sure there was nothing in there that the family wouldn’t like. He was very forward-thinking, a smart guy. He even signed a bunch of labels so we could have some autographed books available. A lot of people knew he had two years to live. We started the book about a year before that even happened. After he got a bad diagnosis, we started doing rewrites. Now we’re just making tweaks and adding pictures and that will probably come out around WrestleMania, too.”
Did you think you’d get the book done before Vader passed away?
Kenny Casanova: “At the time, yeah. Kamala’s came out at the end of 2014 and we started writing Vader’s right after that. I had a draft of 380 pages or so by October, so it probably took me seven months to write. Soon after that, he had a congestive heart issue. He was in and out of the hospital, trying to get his weight down and moved down to be closer with his son Jesse who was in NXT. We contacted DDP. I texted him and asked if he could help Vader out, and he said ah, he’s really old-school and stubborn, so it might be tough. But he did help him out a little bit and then there was a little falling out with that.
When the doctor came in and said you have two years to live, that pissed him off. He felt that wasn’t very good bedside manner. He passed away in one year and 10 or 11 months – it was very close to that two-year mark. It was a pretty good estimation.
So now you’re going to get 400 pages out of a guy after he’s already in the grave. You think he’s done and now you’re going to get more hours of entertainment out of him. It’s kind of neat.”
How is Jesse to work with?
Kenny Casanova: “He is a little difficult in that he’s particular like his dad. Me and him joke that we argue over 5 o’clock versus 5 am. (laughs) But he’s not bad. It’s not like we’re arguing, he just has a particular vision and so do I. He’s probably easier to work with than his dad was. He was tough.”
But you wouldn’t expect anything less from Vader.
Kenny Casanova: “No, no. I went down and saw him last summer or the summer before that. We got stuck on a section. There was this famous story about him and Paul Orndorff getting in a fight backstage, kicking him with flip flops on and all this stuff. It was a long deal to get that chapter written. (laughs)”
Did he not want to mention it?
Kenny Casanova: “He didn’t want it in there. It even says it in the book. If I remember it correctly, it says something like the ghostwriter of this book told me I have to put this story in the book and I don’t want to. But he told me if I don’t, I’m going to catch heat so I’m letting it go in.”
When you have instances like that where there are stories us fans definitely want to know about, but the wrestlers you’re working with don’t want to include them, that must put you in an awkward position.
Kenny Casanova: “Yeah, but usually I win and get it in there somehow. I’ll tell you this and it’s pretty common knowledge. I also wrote Danny Davis’ book. He is super old school and doesn’t like to expose the business. He didn’t even want to talk about wrestlers talking about a finish before a match. And he really didn’t want to bury anybody. He was very protective of everyone he worked with. His book turned out to be more of a story of him growing up on the streets of Boston, stealing and beating people up, then something happened and he needed to turn his life around. So he started to develop a work ethic and earn money a real way so he joined ring crew for WWE, then became head of it, then ran merchandise and worked up to become a referee. Eventually he trained with the guys, became a wrestler and then got a match at WrestleMania. We turned it into an inspirational book because he didn’t particularly want to go the route of a tell-all.”
How did sales for that do?
Kenny Casanova: “All right, not bad. I just wonder if we had written that another way, would it have been bigger? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s still selling, though. These days the book market is smaller because people buy less books, but it seems to last longer. WWE Network exposes generations to people from the past. Then you have somebody like Conrad mentioning somebody who hasn’t been on TV for 20 years and then all of the sudden you sell like 200 copies or something like that out of the blue. Or maybe somebody mentions something on ESPN and then Kamala gets $1,000 in sales out of nowhere. It’s weird how that works.”
It’s all nostalgia and that’s primarily your market. I was on your website checking out the books and another guy I wanted to ask about is Bugsy McGraw. Did his book already come out?
Kenny Casanova: “It just funded. We did a crowd source for that. For some of the older guys, sometimes you don’t know if a project is going to make it. Bugsy contacted me while I was working on Vader’s and Sabu’s at the same time. I’m also working on a remix for Tito Santana. He has a book out that’s like 100 pages – we’re trying to bump that up and make it something more if we can. And Sid has been calling me constantly. So when Bugsy is calling, I’m like I can do it, but it probably won’t be for a year.
So I called up my buddy Ian Douglass who wrote Dan Severn’s book and Hornswoggle’s book, which isn’t out yet, and he’ll soon be putting out a territorial spotlight on wrestling in the Bahamas. Pretty cool dude, he helped me do research for Vader’s book. He had some issues with publishing in the past, and I learned a lot from doing the Kamala book, so I helped him as a self-publishing student. I even gave him Bugsy. It looks like maybe we’ll have an umbrella of cross-promotion, a brand I guess, of wrestling books. There is a female wrestler from back in the day named Miss DeVille – she wrote a Harley Quinn-type romance book. A little tiny taste of wrestling in there somewhere, and it’s called ‘How To Kill A Man.’ I’m going to edit that and we’re going to put that up on the site, too.
I have a sci-fi book up there, too. It doesn’t sell as well as non-fiction. My fan base is basically wrestling fans, but it’s basically a time-traveling book. It still sells, though, because people usually buy it more so because they like my style and less so than my sci-fi fan base.”
Read Part 2 here.
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