Today on the site I’m excited to share a “four for the price of one” cover reveal: the entire Daron’s Guitar Chronicles series by Cecilia Tan is getting a makeover! This award-winning gay coming of age series originally was published as a web serial starting in 2010, with the books following in 2015. Daron’s Guitar Chronicles built up an online following and won the Rose & Bay Award for Crowdfunded Fiction. In 2018-2019 a book publisher was supposed to take over doing the series, promising a big makeover, but they went out of business before that could happen, so now author Cecilia Tan is relaunching the series under new designs herself. Here’s the story:

A slow burn romance between rock stars in the 1980s. 

DARON is a young guitar player with a dream: to make it big like the guys he grew up idolizing—or at least to escape his homophobic family in new Jersey. He makes it to music school in Rhode Island, and the rock clubs of Boston beckon. But in 1986, in the era of AIDS, MTV, and “Just Say No” it’s hard to succeed from the closet., especially when your lead singer is hell-bent on being outrageous. 

ZIGGY is an art-school dropout who knows he’s destined for something bigger and better in life. He craves the spotlight, and he doesn’t care how many hearts he has to break to get to the top. When he sees Daron playing guitar one day, he thinks he’s found his ticket to stardom. 

He’s right.

And here are the old and new covers, with character designs and illustrations by SoCal artist Cheyanne Bueno (aka Milkychai), with design concepts from Dianne K. Garcia, Nikki Webster of Exit Reality Studios, and Gilly Rosenthol Designs!

(Scroll over each pic for Alt Text.)

Old cover shows a cropped photo showing a young man’s legs, wearing blue jeans and white sneakers, next to a black guitar case. New cover images shows colorful illustration of one young man playing an acoustic guitar while another figure in eye liner and leather jacket watches him from afar.

Old cover shows a cropped photo of a young dark-haired man playing the guitar, his hair partly over his face. New cover image shows a colorful illustration of the character with the guitar in a similar pose to the photo, but with the addition of a singer holding a microphone.

Old cover shows a cropped and blurred photo of the torso and hands of a guitar player with a blue-green guitar. New cover shows our two main characters confronting each other, Daron with his arms crossed, Ziggy leaning forward, hands on hips.

Old photo shows a black and white photo of a man with a guitar against a brick wall, from the waist down, the guitar colorized cobalt blue, the bricks colorized red. The new cover image shows Daron and Ziggy smiling and ready to go on tour, Daron with his guitar on his back in a case, Ziggy holding a duffel bag and a microphone.

Buy it: Amazon

Cecilia Tan (she/they) is a biracial bigender bisexual who has been writing queer fiction since the 1990s. The author of over 30 novels, including The Prince’s Boy, the Magic University series, and Slow Surrender, Tan was inducted in 2010 into the LGBT Writers Hall of Fame at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival. The author’s forthcoming projects include a steampunk erotic adventure and a BDSM -sexmagick paranormal romance series.