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.

The image of the earth repeats throughout the book, both in its peaceful blue-marble appearance and its fiery end-of-the-world mode. It appears in various sizes on the title page and at the ends of sections.

The logo for Cherrylog Press, Daniel’s publishing company, came about after a search for photos of abandoned cars to evoke the mood of the James Dickey poem “Cherrylog Road.” This stock photo by Andrejs Pidjass (NejroN Photo) fit the bill nicely, and the typeface Honest John’s  helped evoke a 1930s feeling in a green sampled from the photo, then saturated to help it stand out from the more muted colors of the old car and the surrounding greenery.

This is the premiere publication for Cherrylog Press, and Daniel has more projects planned for the future. Watch this space. Meanwhile, give yourself a reading treat and buy Echo Beach from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, or any Amazon store worldwide. It will soon be available at other online stores, too.

Bruce McAllister is well known in the world of science fiction and fantasy. His novelette Dream Baby was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, and when expanded into a novel it won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Publisher’s Weekly called Dream Baby “A stunning tour de force.” His first novel, Humanity Prime, was chosen by legendary editor Terry Carr as one of the Ace Science Fiction Specials, alongside such talents as Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. LeGuin. His short story “The Boy in Zaquitos” was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King. These days he coaches other successful writers in Southern California.

Bruce recently decided to take a flyer into the indie publishing world. He chose the name Archangel Media for his new enterprise, and I designed the logo on the left for him.  Archangel Media, in turn, has just published two of Bruce's short stories, with covers and interior formatting and design by Zone 1.

Hit is the tale of a young contract killer offered an assignment from God: forgiveness in return for killing the world’s oldest vampire. But even angels can lie, and Anthony must penetrate the mysteries of the Vatican to discover the truth behind the hit and win his real redemption.

You can buy Hit for 99c at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, and all Amazon stores worldwide. 

The Passion: A Western takes us to a nameless dust-and-adobe town where a nameless man must once again shoot his way out of another spaghetti western. But there’s something different about this one. He can’t read the script, he doesn't know who's directing, and the mysterious voice-over narrator portends sacrifice, blood, and death. 

You can buy The Passion: A Western for 99c at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, and all Amazon stores worldwide. 

When I heard that Zachary Jernigan was looking for an e-book formatter, I rushed to throw my hat in the ring. Zachary's  a rising star of science fiction and fantasy, someone whose award-winning professional colleagues say is "a new writer who has found his voice," and who "...can't write a bad story...even if he tried." I really, really wanted to be the one to format his first collection of short fiction, and I'm so happy he chose me for the job.

Zachary had already done a great job of photographing and designing his own cover for the collection. He has a wonderful sense of typography. His design gave me places to go when I began to work on the interior of the book.

Water.

The sea, and a subdued gray-blue I sampled from the place where Zachary's inverted sea meets the sky. Those made up my theme. I purchased the lovely woodcut-style illustration of waves you see here, then colored it that same blue.

The waves recur as scene break and chapter break images throughout the book, carrying the water theme all the way to the end.

Zachary's publishing imprint, Danoor Press, didn't yet have a logo, so I devised the one on the left. Danoor is a city in Zachary's science fiction novel No Return (2013, Night Shade Books), and has a bit of a North African feel to it. The artwork of a North African walled city seemed to harmonize well with a Lapidary Roman typeface, a type of  serif font with letters spread out evenly, much the way Roman stonecutters would have arranged them on the front of an ancient building. Zachary wanted to keep the colors of the artwork subdued, but he liked the eye-popping contrast of the red type, which I think looks gorgeous with grayscale.

The Bottom of the Sea is available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, and all Amazon stores. I hope you'll read the sample and find out for yourself why people are so excited about Zachary Jernigan.

Amy Sisson is another Zone 1 client who came to us through our mutual association with Æon Speculative Fiction (The first was John Kratman, whose story Harry the Crow was featured in an earlier post. )

Amy's e-book short story, Patriot Girls, is now available at all Amazon stores.

Amy's original story knocked the Æon editors' socks off back in 2008 with its lovely writing and haunting, innocent voice. We immediately snapped it up for a future issue. Before we could publish the story, Æon ceased publication. We gathered up our remaining inventory and took it to Patrick Swenson at Fairwood Press.

The ultimate result, topped  off with a stunning cover by Jeff Sturgeon, was End of an Æon, a lovingly designed and published anthology that featured "Patriot Girls" as its lead story, accompanied by a version of the illustration above. The anthology is available in trade paperback and e-book formats from amazon.com and other retailers, or direct from Fairwood Press.

The Patriot Girls Cover
The illustration for Amy's story was one of my very favorites of the dozens I'd done for Æon's four-year run. To create it, I placed the picture of the girl in a prom dress in front of a photo of an antique American flag postcard. The flag is a bit dirty and tattered, which suggests that all is not right with America in this story, while the girl is oblivious and happy in her innocence.

When Amy agreed to use my illustration as an e-book cover, I was thrilled. To reinforce the theme of government, I used a classic Roman font, Perpetua Titling, for the title. I chose the matching Perpetua for Amy's name. The blue is a tint of a color taken from the flag behind the girl. Her hands lead the eye directly down to the author's name and the title.

Because the letterspacing in Perpetua Titling is a little wonky, it takes five separate pictures to properly kern the letters in "PATRIOT GIRLS" so that they look like two typeset words. The "A" is too far from letters on either side, so the "P" and "A" must be separate files. The letters "TRIO" had pretty good form, but the following "T" had to be separated and kerned in alongside the "O" so it looked like it belonged there. The letters in "GIRLS" had good letterspacing, but the space between words was excessive, so "GIRLS" had to be a separate graphic, pulled in toward the first word.

Not all typefaces require this much extra work, but when I was done the results were worth it. Patriot Girls presents a very pretty face to the world. 

The Logo
Amy also needed a  publisher logo to represent her imprint, Tuxedo Bear Press. She wanted a simple graphic that evoked the spirit of the name, and I was lucky to find a nice negative-space drawing she loved for her logo. I added a geometric bow tie of the style seen in illustrations of the 20s and 30s, and chose the Art Deco typeface Broadway to evoke both the formality of the "tuxedo" idea, and the humor inherent in the concept. Its shapes also work well with the curves of the bear and the geometric shapes of the bow tie.

The Pages
For the interior design of Patriot Girls, I wanted to incorporate elements from the cover. I used a scaled-down white star from the original flag artwork for the large images at the beginning and end of the story.

I wanted something slightly different for the scene break ornaments. Keeping with the red, white, and blue of the flag, I decided the pages needed a touch of red. There were of course no red stars, so I cut the white out of a star and inserted a red background in the form of a piece of one of the flag's red fabric stripes. Now everything in the book was working in visual harmony. I think the design does Patriot Girls justice, as I'd hoped I could.

Patriot Girls is available for sale at all Amazon stores, including Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. I think you're going to love it.

I've been building e-books and designing e-book covers and interior illustrations since 1999 for a Very Large Software Company's e-book reader division, for e-book publishing companies, and for an e-book magazine, but Zone 1 is my design business, and it's brand new.

While I've been getting the website ready to go public, I've been working with clients to get their books ready to publish. Yesterday, the first of those books went live on Amazon.

Hello, world. I'd like you to meet Harry the Crow, by John Kratman.

I originally designed a magazine illustration for Harry back in 2007, when Harry the Crow appeared in Æon Speculative Fiction, which I co-edited and co-published for four years with Marti McKenna. Using the original illustration as a guide, I reproduced the layout on a shiny new cover, which also appears in the cover gallery.

John's publishing imprint, Laughing Crow Press, needed a logo to face the world, so I created one featuring a couple of highly amused corvids. You can see it above, and a bit larger in the logo gallery.

The interior design of Harry the Crow uses the feather and robot hand from the cover as design elements: small and large full-color chapter and scene breaks and a graphic title page. You can see more of Harry's pages in the formatting gallery.

So here's Zone 1's first baby to see the light of day at an e-book retailer. As one of its original editors and publishers, I can testify to it being a remarkable story. I hope you'll download, read, and enjoy Harry the Crow.