Protocolize Your Book
Run your manuscript through a book-production factory · with Jenna Dixon, jdbb studio
Eight curated seats. Request one with the form at the bottom of this page; we confirm by email within a few days.
"Protocol" workshops can get abstract — this one is a DIY factory. Bring a real manuscript (a half-finished book, a pile of essays, a thread archive, a zine) and over four sessions we push it through a protocolized production pipeline: a transmittal handshake that generates a custom authoring template, a conformance preflight that negotiates messy human input into machine-readable structure, and a deterministic transform that yields a print PDF and an EPUB from one source. You handle the protocol concepts hands-on — typed interfaces, controlled vocabularies, inheritable templates — and delegate some drafting to an LLM agent to see why a human-legible protocol is also machine-legible. Everyone leaves with a typeset artifact and a felt answer to the symposium's question: how much of a craft should be protocolized, and what does it cost?
Why a book, now?
Fewer people read books than a decade ago, and four million new titles a year — most unvetted, a growing share machine-made — have taught the rest to trust the object less. A finished book is the one thing that flood cannot counterfeit, and a protocol is how you tell the two apart. That is the problem the factory answers; the short, sourced version is here.
Who it's for
Writers, editors, designers, small-press and self-publishers, zine-makers, newsletter authors, and protocol-curious people who have a body of text they'd like to see become a real book. No coding, typesetting, or protocol-studies background required — the factory handles the machinery; you make the protocol decisions.
You must bring real material — a manuscript or text collection you'd like to turn into a book, as a Word file (.docx); the factory reads Word. Any size, rough is welcome. This is non-negotiable: the workshop runs on your files, not samples.
The four sessions
Cumulative — each session builds on the last, so please plan to attend all four. All times UTC.
| # | Session | Day | UTC | Local |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Handshake — fill a real transmittal, get a generated authoring template | Mon Sep 21 | 15:00–16:30 | ET 11:00 · PT 08:00 · CET 17:00 |
| 2 | Preflight — run messy input through the conformance detector; Keep / Strip / Convert | Mon Sep 21 | 16:30–18:00 | ET 12:30 · PT 09:30 · CET 18:30 |
| 3 | Build + delegate — produce print PDF + EPUB from one source; direct an LLM agent | Tue Sep 22 | 15:00–16:30 | ET 11:00 · PT 08:00 · CET 17:00 |
| 4 | Show-and-tell — a lightning tour of your artifact, feeding a group synthesis & rubric | Tue Sep 22 | 16:30–18:00 | ET 12:30 · PT 09:30 · CET 18:30 |
EU/US-friendly window. In Asia these land in the evening — we record the lecture-style portions of sessions 1 and 3.
What to bring — and what you don't need
A manuscript, in whatever you write in. You do not need Word. The factory reads one thing from your file: the name of each paragraph's style. Any editor that saves .docx will do — Word, Word for the web, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer, Apple Pages.
- Chapter titles → Heading 1.
- Sub-heads → Heading 2.
- Special paragraphs → a marker at the start:
[[quote]],[[verse]],[[epigraph]],[[code]],[[break]]. The build applies the style and removes the marker. - Export .docx → Inspect, which is free and tells you what it found.
Starting from a blank page instead? Session 1 generates your authoring template — .docx for Word, .odt for LibreOffice Writer — with every style already in the gallery. Full notes: Bring your manuscript.
You'll leave with
- A typeset PDF + EPUB of your own material, produced through the factory.
- A reusable custom authoring template generated from your transmittal.
- A transferable mental model: your craft re-seen as a protocol stack — typed interfaces, controlled vocabularies, inheritable templates.
- A decision rubric for what to protocolize and what to leave to craft judgment — useful well beyond book production.
- First-hand experience delegating creative work to an LLM agent, and a sense of why it works.
Request a seat
This is a small hands-on lab (8 seats). We curate for a mix of source material and backgrounds, then confirm by email within a few days with the Discord invite and calendar invites. Fields marked * are required.