I have been keeping something back for a few weeks, and this is the week I get to stop.

The Bear Hunt stories have new covers

When I first put The Bear Hunt out into the world, I made the covers myself, in a hurry, because the book was ready and I wanted it in your hands. They did the job. They were never quite the books.

So this summer I commissioned illustrators to draw Augie and Wes properly. I gave them a short brief and a long one. The short one was two big bearded men in their forties, a dog, and the Cascades at dusk. The long one was every scene in the series where I could picture the two of them standing still long enough to be painted.

Here is what came back.

Book One is the cabin. Snow to the porch, smoke from the chimney, the windows lit, and the two of them out front with Mabel looking up at Wes as if she has already decided about him. If you have read the book, you know she had.

Book Two is Diane’s wedding. Tweed, string lights, a purple sky, and the couple dancing on the right are the bride and groom. The two men in the middle are only guests. That was the whole point of that book, and the illustrators understood it without my saying so.

Book Three is the festival. Lights strung through the trees, a stage going off in the distance, tents, and a crowd of men who look like Augie. Wes in a tank top and a bandana, which is not how he arrived at the start of Book One. He got there.

And the prequel, which is a different night entirely. Fifteen years earlier, a campfire, a lake, two younger men who have not yet said the thing between them. One of them never will. If you have not read The Timber Wolf, it is free, and it is here.

The thing I love most is small. Augie has the grey at his temples that he has carried since the first page of Book One. Wes’s arm is around him on the first cover and his hand is on Augie’s arm on the third, and in between, at the wedding, they are standing the way people stand when they have stopped needing to hold on. Nobody asked for any of that. They read the books.

The new covers are rolling out across Amazon over the next couple of weeks, so if you see the old one on a listing, that is only the lag. The books inside are the same books. A Bear’s Winter, Book Four, arrives in November wearing the new look from the start, and it gets its own reveal closer to the day.

Thanks to all my First Light Club Voters and commentators, your guidance proved invaluable in developing these covers. I hope you like them as much as I do.

Line of the Ball is on Goodreads, one hundred copies, from September 12th

Next Saturday a Goodreads giveaway opens for Line of the Ball, the first book of the Windward Cup Dynasty. One hundred Kindle copies, U.S. entries only, running through October 12th.

If you have been curious about a broke Texas ranch hand and the polo club that wanted his horsemanship, this is the cheapest way in. If you have already read it, please point a friend at it. Giveaway entries are the kind of thing that only work when people share them.

The entry link will be live on the book’s Goodreads page from the 12th, and I will put it in next week’s email.

Sudden Death lands October 6th

Book Three of the Windward Cup Dynasty is on preorder now and releases on October 6th. I am not going to tell you what happens. I will tell you that it opens in March, that Julian and Mason are at the center of it as they always are, and that it is the first book in the series where I had to stop writing for a day because of something I had done to a character I liked.

If you preorder it, it arrives on your Kindle while you are asleep on the 6th, which is the best kind of morning.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HFH497V1

Everything else this week

The Bear Hunt books and both Windward Cup books are in BookMojo’s LGBTQIA+ Romance Reads promo all month, alongside 106 other queer romances. I always come out of these with two or three authors I had never heard of. Go and browse.

The Hollow Clock deal week is over, the price is back where it was, and the reviews are still arriving. Thank you. If you read it in August and have not said what you thought yet, a line on Amazon or Goodreads is worth more to a book like this than I can easily explain.

And the Bear Hunt covers are the first of three. The Rourke Correlation series are getting new faces too, and so is Under the Tracks, the Chicago series that starts in February. First Light Club members will see both before anyone else. Everyone else gets them here, one week at a time.

What do you think of Augie and Wes, drawn? I would honestly like to know. Reply, or find me on Bluesky.

Yours, Elias