Run your manuscript through a book-production factory · with Jenna Dixon, jdbb studio
"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?
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. Any size, rough is welcome. This is non-negotiable: the workshop runs on your files, not samples.
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 | 17:00–18:30 | ET 13:00 · PT 10:00 · CET 19:00 |
| 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 | 17:00–18:30 | ET 13:00 · PT 10:00 · CET 19:00 |
EU/US-friendly window. In Asia these land in the evening — we record the lecture-style portions of sessions 1 and 3.
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 Zoom link and calendar invites. Fields marked * are required.