My book, the Lost War for Texas, has won the Presidio La Bahia Award for best book on Texas history for 2024. This is one of the top prizes in the state, presented by the Sons of the Republic of Texas.
Sales are going well, for a university press book. They don't update me on the numbers too frequently, but it's already close to, or even surpassing, what they said it would do for the first year, and it's only been out 4 months. I've got all 5 stars on Amazon, and if any of you guys bought it there, I recommend you put in a review.
I haven't really gotten any negative feedback. When I did my peer reviews, one reviewer brought up a few issues, which I was able to address in the final version. So I had an academic who knows his stuff sling all the arrows he could think of into it, and I've since armored up, basically by showing more in-depth research to validate my claims. Any criticisms now would be out of left field, and I don't really expect anything like that.
I've done a number of events to promote it and have sold about 100 copies at those events, which is pretty good considering the price tag. I've done some marketing, but deliberately held off bigger efforts until after the election, since the media simply wouldn't care until then. Expecting to do more soon. Same with events. Waiting to finalize some scheduling things but plan to do more in the coming year.
So for those of you who have bought it, I hope you've enjoyed the read. If it's just a big paperweight, I hope it's keeping your SEC tiebreaker calculations from blowing out the window. But I do hope you will get to it eventually.
If anyone wants a signed copy, I can send you a book if you will PM me. If you've already bought it, I've got a little card I can sign that you can stick inside it.

www.lostwarfortexas.com

Congratulations. I'm very appreciative of your efforts. This book is outstanding and deserves the accolades. It really filled a hole in my understanding of the settlement of Texas. It grabbed me when I come to realize Stephen F Austin came into the area I live in only a few years after all this ruckus. Also that several settlers coming with him were coming back.

I live on a property in Brenham that was one of the old 300 family's property that abuts Austin's original tract he owned. In fact, it's not too far from the spot on New Year's creek where they first camped when they got here. There are a few beautifully grand Oak trees that have been confirmed were seedlings in 18th century Spanish Texas. Have always wondered who camped under them near the creek. Your book further activated my imagination.

Rongagin, I was at the Book Festival for a couple of hours in the A&M Press tent.

As for why they've never made a movie, it's because no one ever knew this stuff. The main outlines of Texas History were written mostly in ignorance of these events. Mirabaeau Lamar knew of some of them, but he was almost unique among the early Texas founders. Others, particularly the Sam Houston acolytes, wanted to construct a story that started with them and ignored antecedants.

The few accounts of it in early Texas writings are very simplistic, and this was continued, as later historians added more to the Texas story, but never actually touched the basic outline of events set in the 1850s. This keeps up until the 20th Century, when TR Fehrenbach writes in "Lone Star" about the expedition, reducing it to basically a paragraph, and dismissing the people involved as "common cutthroats." Cutthroats, indeed, who in some cases had degrees from Harvard and Princeton.

There were two books written in the early 20th Century (1949 and 42), but these were somewhat limited in scope and didn't really change the narrative much. They basically missed two of the key first-hand accounts, one which came out in the 1920s, but didn't really get traction until the 1940s, and another, published in 1860 in an obscure San Antonio Unionist newspaper (guess how many copies of that survived burning). This latter account wasn't rediscovered and published until the 1960s. Finally, all of these Anglo-centric accounts completely missed the Spanish Bexar Archives as a source, as it was not transcribed or translated until the 1960s itself.

So my book is a whole reframing of this conflict based on decades of untapped sources. The best Texas historians were mostly unaware of these new sources, and when they did, they often thought they didn't add anything new, or dismissed them. So, not to toot my own horn, but a lot of the stuff I found was basically unknown. Much of this book also depended on technology: digitized souces, including a keyword-searchable version of the Bexar Archives that was basically research that was impossible to conduct until about 2010.

p_bubel, Make time to read it. I feel confident that you will enjoy it (everyone else has), and I need word-of-mouth to start spreading the word. If all of you guys and my other readers make a recommendation to your friends now (in time for Christmas), that will help greatly.

jaydoug, thanks for your comments. Yes, this puts Austin in greater context. He comes into East Texas and calls it a "howling wilderness" which starts off the Anglo idea that Spain and Mexico were just incompetent and had failed to populate Texas. While partly true, the full story is that Texas, though weak, was slowly growing until this war devastated it. This was the event that made Austin's colony possible. And all later Texas history flows from it. Think of the Freedonian Revolt. They settled in "empty" lands and then felt betrayed by the Mexicans who denied their land claims. The reason the Mexicans did that is because these were not "empty" lands. They were vacant because of the revolution, their Spanish/Mexican owners having been killed or fled in the chaos of war.

Just discovered at Thanksgiving dinner that my older brother was fascinated about your book and checked it out of the library. Apparently they have two copies and there is a wait list of 30 people, he indicated he had to read in within three weeks and then return it. I decided to give him my copy and he was thrilled. Oh, and I'll buy another copy for myself, thanks for all your hard work and congrats on the award.