They say the stolen rose blooms best.

When Ethan Keating Mendoza is hired as a gardener at an old Victorian residence in central Indiana, he has one clear mission: make the roses bloom. Ethan’s life is roses--he’s the son of a hedge witch and a partner in his father’s rose growing business--but he has no magic himself.

The Kilbride estate is wild and overgrown. The roses have not bloomed in decades, and Ethan fears he may be in over his head. Worse still is Louis, the peculiar trustee of the property, who lives under a bloodthirsty curse that ties him to the garden. But Louis gives Ethan a chance, and Ethan is determined to do right by the suffering roses. As Ethan and Louis grow closer, Ethan becomes increasingly desperate to save the man he loves from the garden’s curse.

But the garden isn’t letting them go without a fight.

Cover design

The second book I designed for Shiraki Press was Emily O’Malley Liu’s debut Wine for Roses, a gardencore romantic fantasy set on a Victorian estate in the American Midwest. This cover needed to evoke all that ostentatious Victorian romance and also hit the “roses” theme aggressively, but it also needed to steer clear of the “Hallmark Valentine’s Day card” vibe, which is really easy to trip into as soon as there’s a rose involved at all.

I started with a creative brief:

I kept pulling books with this kind of lush, full art style and discovering that most of them were done by Lisa Marie Pompilio. I reached out to her, and she designed the perfect front cover for this book.

While I didn’t do the title type in this case—Lisa integrated it directly into her art—the spine, back, and interior design were still on me.

Interior design

For the interior, I wanted a graphic chapter header that evoked Lisa’s ornate cover art and centered the titular roses, with accent typography to match. To that end, I paired a couple pieces of carefully chosen stock art with an elegant, simple serif:

I also wanted an interior title page that echoed the cover, but simplified for clean black-and-white presentation. Here’s the resulting interior title spread:

Marketing

Here are some examples of marketing images I created to support the book’s launch:

Buy the book!

You can pick up your copy from Shiraki Press or request it at your favorite book retailer. Buying direct from our website is the best way to support our press, but I’ll also recommend Bookshop.org as an amazing way to support your local indie bookstore. You can even request it at your local library!

Wine for Roses (Shiraki Press)