Featured Guest: E. Davies ~ Guest Post #Giveaway

We are so happy to have author E. Davies on the blog today. It's been a long time since Ed has visited us and we are so happy they're here! Check out the post and the awesome giveaway at the end.

Hello, Diverse Readers! Thank you to Mere for having me around the blog today. I’ve been quiet online lately, so it’s good to get out and about… Wait, this counts as social interaction, right? ;)

I’m Ed, and I started writing MM romance as E. Davies in 2013. Since then I’ve written over forty novels, which seems hard to believe now. I recently added up my published books and found out that I’ve passed three million words!

Four years ago this week, I hit publish on what would go on to become my best-known book, Buzz. This first book in the Riley Brothers series is a quirky, small-town romance about an adorable art curator and an injured hockey player turned beekeeper. Five more books followed (Clang, Swish, Crunch, Slam, and Grind—all onomatopoeia reflecting what sports are featured in the book), each following a different brother or best friend.

The Riley Brothers was, at the time, quite a different series for me to write. Unlike most of my books, which were set in larger cities in America, I set this series in a small town I know fairly well in New Brunswick, Canada. Rather than the standalone books I’d been writing before then, I wrote a group of guys creating their own found family like I never had before. Buying houses next door to each other and knocking down the fences between their backyards turned out to be symbolic of the family they created together over the course of the series!

This series marked a milestone in my own writing and how personal I allowed it to get. Those who know me can spot quite a bit of my personality throughout the series—it was like I suddenly found my voice! As I did, I took more liberties to show the world as I experience it. I introduced a nonbinary side character who uses they/them pronouns, which was hard to find late 2015. I even wrote my first trans main character—James, in the sixth and final book, Grind.

Since this series, I’ve written several more found families in other series: Significant Brothers, Hidden Creek, F-Word, Hart’s Bay, and more. But I keep returning to the Riley Brothers as the moment I leaned into writing feel-good, low-angst romances without shame, without calling them “guilty pleasures”, because everyone deserves happy endings!

In these guys, I found my voice and my calling, and I’ll forever hold them in my heart. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to look back at the series several years later, having gone through huge personal changes in this span of time, and see myself figuring out who I am through these books. The story I thought was settled had only just begun!

But the Riley Brothers’ stories aren’t quite over. For years, people have asked if there are plans for a follow-up story about the guys’ lives. I’ve always said the time wasn’t right. I wasn’t even sure why, I just knew it wasn’t happening! And then, a few months ago, I visited the real-life Fredericton again. It suddenly clicked into place: what Cam and Noah are doing now, and why the time wasn’t right to catch up with them until now.

I immediately wrote two short bonus stories— “Boo”, following Cam and Noah’s new family on Halloween, and “Jingle”, where the guys all get together for Christmas to talk about the course their lives are taking. A lot of growth has come about for all, but some things never change. I cried my way through typing The End all over again, haha! And since it’s been such a joy to revisit these stories as Michael Pauley records the audio, I had to get him to do the bonus stories, too.

Which is why I’m so thrilled to launch the Riley Brothers collection! For the first time, this collection gathers up all six novels plus these two new exclusive stories. It’s available in both ebook and audio—over 1500 pages long in ebook, and over 38 hours in audio! Sharing the Riley Brothers for the first time with new readers and revisiting them with long-time readers has been such a pleasure.

Which brings me to the giveaway I have for you today: two people will win an ebook copy of your choice of my books AND a US or UK code for the Riley Brothers collection on Audible!

Since 2013, E. Davies has crafted feel-good stories of men in love--stories that are brimming with hope, found families, and realistic guys next door getting their modern fairytale endings. As for hobbies: rescuing bees, dancing badly, traipsing through meadows, and studying photos of cute guys for research totally count, right?

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Many E. Davies books are now available in audio! Find all available Audible titles here: edaviesbooks.com/audiobooks

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