For several years, I’ve been creating “storynotes”, collections of story variants for particualr folk tales, as well as collections of news stories contemprary to particular historical events that I can then use as the basis for developing my own accounts, and then stories, around particular events.

Now that I’m “retired”, I’m also looking for merch opportunities to try to claw back some of the costs associated with telling tales (a 2-3 hour folk night or open mic, at a pint of shandy every 40-50 minutes, = 15 squids of cost…). So I’ve started looking at producing booklets I can print-on-demand and then sell for a fiver.

I started off with a couple of runs using Lulu, (which I’d used to test publish some Island Tales storynotes a couple of years ago), using the Lulu book cover desginer to generate simple covers, but now I’m looking at Amazon, which is as cheap, if not cheaper, for one-off print on demand, plus it has the global reach in terms of marketing not just print-on-demand books but also ebook variants.

Up till now I’ve been using Jupyter Book (sphinx) but publishing, but Jupyter Book never really met its early promise, is a faff when trying to generate non-HTML outputs (PDF, docx, e-book), and, as I understand it, is in the process of moving to a myst/node rather sphinx/python build process. So instead, I’m moving to quarto, which is well-supported and rich featured, although I haven’t yet worked out a clean way of generating an index. (That said, the epub doesnlt seem to work for me with Amazon KDP; instaed, I have to load a docx into the KDP app, then generate the KPF file. That may simply be down to how i config the epub in the quarto build, or they may be some other issue.)

As my main output will be PDF, I’ve started hacking together LaTeX templates, admittedly with quite a lot of support from Claude.ai and ChatGPT, partly because they can generated the code quick than I can, partly because I don’t (yet) know how to write LaTex all that well.

For the inner book content, I’ve started putting together core templates for the different booklets I want to strat producing, handling things like page layout, headers, header undlerines, page numbering etc. (I’ve still not settled on if / how I want to use footnotes; I currently inline footnotes…)

I also have templates for blurb pages (copyright / about) and title pages etc.

For the covers, I’m using LaTeX templates that allow me to fix a design and then customise it with text, fine-tuned positing, and colour themes. (The idea is that books will be in series, and I want each series to have a similar look and feel.

As part of the cover, I can also (optinally) overlay debug lines.

To improve reproducibility further, I’m using customised .devcontainer in VS Code for the build process so that I can build a book or cover independently of whatever machine I’m on. (This extends to making sure the fonts I want to use are available. My original tests were done on a Mac and I’d unwittingly used fonts that ship with Mac but are commercial fonts. Adding fonts into the build process and then using those means I keep that part of the build reporducible too.)

For the Amazon publishing, the cover needs to mount an ISBN. Again, this is configurable.

The designs are rather utlitiarian (I’ve only just started out on this process too…), but then, so are the designs in the cover design tools on Lulu and Amazon.

The most important point, though, is that while I used genAI to help write the LaTeX, everyhting in the publishing process is scripted and tuned using static configuration files. The process is idempotent. I am in control. There is no genAI in the actual publication route that is likely to give a different result every time you run it.

I’m a Senior Lecturer at The Open University, with an interest in #opendata policy and practice, as well as general web tinkering... View all posts by Tony Hirst

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