Cathy Holton wrote about the American South. She told stories about sisterhood and southernness and secrets, and they were often funny and always worthwhile.  Between 2006 and Cathy’s death in 2013, Ballantine Books published four of her novels--Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes, Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes, Beach Trip, and Summer in the South. Her own publishing imprint, Branwell Books, published a fifth novel, The Sisters Montclair, in 2012, and a novella, Love in the Time of Hurricanes, in 2013.

The Rico Boys—while full of humor and southern settings—​is something new for Cathy Holton fans. Two young men who live in their mother’s basement watching endless repeats of Wiseguys finally get their chance to be real mobsters...or so they think. Hijinks, as some wise person said, ensue.

Mark Holton brought The Rico Boys to Zone 1 for a cover and interior formatting and design. We worked through a number of cover options, from photo-realistic to 1960s minimalist, before arriving at the cover above, which we both thought epitomized the essence of the Rico boys and their madcap adventures in pursuit of mobsterhood.

The interior design features a thematic repeat of the cover firearms--a .38 revolver and a toy raygun—​and section ornaments in the form of bullet holes, all in a not-terribly-serious mood.

Mark opted for a catalog, so all Cathy’s previous books are linked for instant purchasing. Mark says Cathy left other unpublished books, so we can hope to see more in future from this fascinating Southern author.

You can buy The Rico Boys at Amazon.com and all Amazon stores worldwide, or read it for free with Kindle Unlimited.

13 Stories, 13 Illustrations, 13 Essays
(This collection includes Hugo and Nebula finalist story "The Good Pup")
Enter a world of miraculous dogs, invading fairy swarms, and mysterious eggs. Ride the blue highways with a retired organlegger, and journey through a wasteland with three poets. Visit a government-funded laboratory crowded with typing chimpanzees. See what a dying man sees in the waves. Meet one man with a hunger for deadly music and another who sells it on the street. 

These thirteen short stories by your humble Zone 1 designer have all (but one) been published as individual e-books, and are still available at most e-book retailers, but I had wanted for a long time to collect them in one place and at the same time offer them at a better individual price. I adapted the art from the individual books' covers to serve as full-color interior illustrations, and included 13 essays to tell something of the story behind the stories.

My daughter suggested the title, which is also the title of one of the short stories, which first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. 

I made a background for the cover by blending two photographs of the sky into a dark-to-light continuum, then added elements from the covers of the various short story e-books—the murderous traffic satellite CHiPSat from “The Old Organ Trail,” a computer from “The Bard Effect,” and Pup from “The Good Pup.”  I chose Arial for the cover typeface. Despite being so commonly used as a text face, Arial can be really lovely and understated in a cover. I filled the cover lettering with various areas from the cover's sky.

For the book’s interior, I chose a bright medium blue for headers and large initial caps to continue the “sky” theme, and created a graphic of a planet and stars for the end ornaments, which I filled with the starscape from the top of the cover. A smaller sprinkling of stars serves as a section break ornament.

Lillian and I worked together on covers and design for her two non-fiction books for writers, The Writer's Spellbook and The Fright Factory.  When it came time to update her 18th-century Caribbean pirate romance, Ship of Dreams, we started with a romance-worthy cover. Although we tried out designs that featured sailing ships of the period, the eventual winner was clear. For a pirate romance, nothing beats a sexy pirate.

The bad-boy hero of Ship of Dreams is the notorious French pirate, L'Ange Noir, who is regarded with fear and loathing by English captains throughout the Caribbean. The Black Angel meets his match, however, when he kidnaps Lady Rosalind Hanshaw, the daughter of an English lord, and her young companion. Much romance and thrilling action ensues, and Lillian imbues the book with enough realism to make you hear the roar of cannon and the clash of sabers.

Bruce McAllister, whose books Hit and The Passion, a Western made an earlier appearance here when he re-published them under the Archangel Media imprint, has been busy getting more of his critically acclaimed stories re-published as e-books. Zone 1 Design provided new covers with custom title treatments, formatting, and interior book design with custom color graphics for these three additions to an impressive and growing list of books.

The Girl Who Loved Animals tells the story of Lissy, who makes an extraordinary sacrifice to help save a magnificent animal from extinction, and Jo, the social worker who risks everything to make it happen. 

This story originally appeared in OMNI Magazine, edited by Ellen Datlow.

You can buy The Girl Who Loved Animals now for 99c at Amazon.com,  Amazon.co.uk,  Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores worldwide. Also at Scribd, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

In Dream Baby,  army nurse Mary Damico dreams the deaths of soldiers before they happen. When she is recruited for a secret unit of other ESP “talents” run by a rogue CIA psychiatrist, she discovers the real dangers of her gift.

“Dream Baby” is based on  interviews with two hundred veterans who reported paranormal experiences that kept them alive in wartime. Nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards, it was later expanded into a critically acclaimed novel of the same name.

You can buy Dream Baby the Original Novelette now for 99c at Amazon.com,  Amazon.co.uk,  Amazon.ca, Amazon. com.au, and all Amazon stores worldwide. Also at Scribd, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

The Boy in Zaquitos is the story of Matt, who  serves his country by spreading plague in places his government wants to destabilize. The boy is one of a million poor kids who will all soon be dead of the plague Matt will unleash here. But Matt sees the boy’s face in his dreams, and if he’s ever to be human again, he has to make a difference in this one child’s life.

The Boy in Zaquitos was selected by Stephen King for The Best American Short Stories 2007

You can buy The Boy in Zaquitos now for 99c at Amazon.com,  Amazon.co.uk,  Amazon.ca, Amazon. com.au, and all Amazon stores worldwide. Also at Scribd, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

Earlier this year Sense of Wonder Press released The Writer's Spellbook: Creating Magic Systems for Fantasy, with cover and formatting by Zone 1. Lillian Csernica—whose fiction has  appeared in such venues as Weird Tales, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Midnight Movie Creature Feature 2, HORRORS! 365 Scary Stories, and Year's Best Horror Stories XXI—quickly followed that up with a second volume of writing tips: The Fright Factory: Building Better Horror. 

The Fright Factory is based on Lillian's horror fiction-oriented columns for Speculations magazine, an excellent publication for writers that ran from 1995-2006. Inside is advice on setting, suspense, monsters good, bad, and otherwise, and lots more useful information for anyone wanting to write effectively in this increasingly popular genre.

Lillian asked me to follow up on my far gentler Writer's Spellbook cover and interior design with something appropriately chilling. Borrowing the type color and positioning to carry over the branding from the Spellbook's cover, my task was to create quite a different atmosphere for this book. After a few rounds of design prototypes, we settled on emphasizing the "fright" aspect with the cover above.

The interior design utilizes blood-splatter illustrations to mark the ends of chapters and graphic chapter headers that match the dominant cover typeface, Nightbird, here combined with the condensed and slightly dramatic sans-serif font League Gothic. It all goes together to create a creepy little package suitable to the book's content and audience (horror writers and the horror-curious) .

The Fright Factory is available from today on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores, and will appear soon at other e-book outlets. If you're interested in the horror genre, you'll want to check it out.

Christa Charter published her first Lexy Cooper mystery, Schooled, in 2012, and the world of game development has never been the same, as gaming insiders speculated about the origins of Christa's good guys, bad guys, and murder victims. She followed it over the next 15 months with Pwned and Griefed, all published by Missing Spoon Publishing, Christa's publishing imprint.

In addition to “Videogames, Sex, and Murder” the Lexy Cooper mysteries offer up enough authenticity about the games industry to make the books special favorites of readers who work in the world of games. You can find out more about Lexy and her world at LexyCooper.com.

Recently Christa talked to Zone 1 about a cover for her new nonfiction book, B.Y.O.P. - Be Your Own Publisher She provided a sketch of a concept, and I started work.

The Lexy books feature really fabulous covers by Brett Parson. I wanted to echo the appeal of those covers while staying true to the simplicity of Christa’s original concept.

I started with the warm, exciting colors from Brett’s covers; they're spicy and appealing, really stand out on a retailer’s page, and they would help tie in this book’s cover with the fiction covers. I used a background red from Griefed and the gold of the lettering on Pwned as my basic colors. I chose Komika, a comics-inspired typeface, and paired it with Allura, a lovely, readable modern script. I liked Christa’s paper scraps idea—possibly because it looks a lot like the top of my desk—so with a lot of fussing and fiddling over the details (the angle of the large paper scrap precisely matches the angle of the title frames on the Lexy covers, for instance), I combined the paper scraps, colors, and typefaces into a final cover.

B.Y.O.P. is available today on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores for $1.49 or the local equivalent. While you're at it, remember to check out the Lexy Cooper mysteries, Schooled, Pwned , and Griefed.

Two years ago I published The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, a book about common early-draft mistakes that writers make over and over. The Little Book showed writers how to recognize those kinds of errors and correct them, thereby cleaning up their manuscripts, saving time and money on editing services, and strengthening their writing in general.

When I updated The Little Book and expanded it to nearly twice its length, I wanted a new cover to bring it to the attention of potential new readers. To that end I studied the covers of best-selling writing books and came up with a design I thought fit into the genre pretty well while also standing out with bold graphic elements and color. To point up the “writing” theme and harmonize with the antique look of the quill pen, I chose Century, a classic text typeface dating back to the 1890s that happily does double duty as display type. Many text faces do not, or at least not successfully. Century is both timeless and versatile.

I added a few touches of Allura script to echo the red color and curvy shapes of the quill pen. I tried out quite a few lovely script faces before settling on that one for having just enough contrast with Century’s shapes, and being just modern enough to stand out from it while still feeling harmonious.

I carried the red into the book’s interior with the headlines and ornaments. The red quill pen re-appears inside as section and chapter break ornaments, and in the color of the Table of Contents links.

At the back of the book is a quick reference that reiterates the major points of the chapters. Writers can use it to check over a manuscript without having to flip back and forth through the book. Red graphics in the shape of a magnifying glass, a question mark, and tools create quick visual shorthand for “look for this,” “ask yourself this,” and “here's how to fix it.”

The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers (Revised and Expanded Edition) is available now at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores for $4.99 or the local equivalent. It will be available soon at Kobo.

Heinz Glas was a young medical student in Vienna when Hitler annexed Austria in early 1938. Six months later, Heinz escaped deportation to a death camp by the skin of his teeth and fled Austria for Switzerland, leaving his family behind but hoping for their eventual reunion.

“My biography is in many respects a tribute to my father, Ernst Glas,” says Heinz, who changed his name to Henry Grant when he came to the United States. “I loved my Papa and his philosophy of living. Papa was generous, grateful for his friends, and always forgiving.”

When Robert Dailey brought Henry's story, Resilience, to Zone 1 Design toward the end of 2013, I knew this book would require a very personal cover that emphasized Henry's love for the exceptional man that was his father—a cover that showed the relationship that forms the heart of the book. I went through the photographs that accompanied the manuscript and found the snapshot of young Heinz and his Papa in happier days, before Hitler's insanity destroyed the lives they knew. Over this lovely photo I placed the last postcards Ernst sent to Heinz from Thereisenstadt, the infamous concentration camp near Prague in the present-day Czech Republic. Dr. Dailey picked the bottom two photos of Henry from later in his life in the U.S. I sepia-toned the photos to harmonize with the hue of the postcards.

For the cover type I used the typefaces City Of and Bazar, both reminiscent of the pre-war era, then created a custom effect on the title type to pop it out from the midtones of the photos. I colored both the interior headers and the printer's ornaments the rich brown of the cover type.

Using that same image from 1930, I designed a graphic title page to begin Resilience with the photo that lies at its very heart.

Henry's story of his escape from Austria and his long and accomplished life (he died in 2007 at the age of 95) is one you’ll never forget.  Resilience is available as of today at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores worldwide. It will soon be for sale at other online retailers too.

Zone 1 client Lillian Csernica is a veteran writer whose stories have appeared in Weird Tales among other periodicals, and anthologies that include 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Midnight Movie Creature Feature 2, HORRORS! 365 Scary Stories, and Year's Best Horror Stories XXI. 

Wearing her nonfiction hat, Lillian wrote columns for Speculations magazine, an excellent publication for writers that ran from 1995-2006. One of those columns was The Writer's Spellbook, wherein she outlined the principles of creating believable, practical, and well-grounded magic systems for fantasy fiction. 

 Recently, Lillian decided to use the material in those columns to create an e-book. She brought the book to Zone 1 and hired me to do the cover, interior design, and formatting. The Writer's Spellbook: Creating Magic Systems for Fantasy (US, UK, CA, AU), is the result. Listen up: if you write fantasy, you need this book.

The idea of a spellbook for writers is enchanting all by itself, and the magical book artwork provided a base on which to build a cover design to attract readers. It's a high-contrast cover that jumps off a sales page and pulls viewers into the concept of practical magic, and of writing as a magical act. I repeated the idea with scroll designs on the title page, chapter headings, and end-of-chapter ornaments.

I also used color throughout, repeating the cover's red in the interior's headers. Color is still quite under-used in e-book design, and I like to include it wherever it works with the spirit of the design I'm creating. Readers have long been accustomed to most fiction and narrative non-fiction being presented in black and white, and while I think some aspects of a book benefit from that restriction, there are still plenty of places to use color in ways that don't interfere with the reading experience.

Since I'm offering publisher logos at no extra charge with cover plus formatting, Lillian's publishing enterprise, Sense of Wonder, got a whimsical full-color logo added in to the deal. 

Watch for more great fiction and nonfiction as Sense of Wonder's future unfolds.

The Writer's Spellbook is on sale as of today at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores worldwide. It will be available at other internet bookstores soon. Add it to your collection of books for writers. You'll be glad you did.

R.K. MacPherson burst onto the urban fantasy scene earlier this year like one of Isaura Durand’s arcane lightning-bolts with the publication of Stormcaller, the first book in his Stormcaller Cycle.  Suddenly, Seattle was alive with magic as a young, untried witch struggled to master powers of a kind her eldritch mentors had never encountered, and hungry demons and murderous blood mages zeroed in on the Emerald City to control or kill her. Even the FBI got in on the act.

R.K. designs his own covers, and he does a great job of it, as you can see. With the publication of Assassins, the second Stormcaller book, however, he decided to turn the formatting and interior design chores over to Zone 1 Design.

Bring on the Red!
Back when all books were printed on paper, a writer could only dream of a publisher adding color to her books. Each color required a separate printing operation for every page on which it occurred, and the process was far too expensive to be used on all but a few special titles. With the coming of e-books color became free for all authors, though many still don’t take advantage of it. Even rendered on the monochrome screen of an e-ink device, colors translate to shades of gray that set a book's design apart from the usual black and white. On tablets they create a really standout effect, and help carry a theme through from the cover to the interior of the book.

For Assassins, I chose dark red brush-stroke ornaments and matching headers to echo the cover colors while setting this book apart in a subtle but distinctive way. 

Use your book to sell your book
Every author should take advantage of the opportunity offered by one book to sell his other books. Catalog pages provide great advertising by exposing readers to your cover, your sales copy, and a handy link to make a purchase right from the page. It's one of the best free marketing tools available to indie authors.

Working on Assassins was a lot of fun for me. Trying to match the sophisticated drama of R.K. MacPherson’s lovely cover in the interior design was deeply satisfying. I hope I’ll get to work with him again.

Assassins is on sale now at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, and all Amazon stores worldwide. It will soon be available at other e-book retailers, too.