This Friday the artist Lajuana Lampkins is publishing The Collected Works of Prince Akbar aka Jus Rhymz, which she edited. I’m writing this week about the process of creating the book and today I want to cover the modern tool set for self-publishing, with a focus on the book interior.

I helped publish my first book in May of 1992. It was a book of performance poetry called bricks a new book of poems. I started a book company called Juggernautco with designer Johnny Stepping who is a brilliant thinker and really had a lot to do with how I still approach getting things done.

I never would have been able to publish anything without him. He also brought his production capabilities with hardware (Mac!) and software (Quark Xpress 3.32!) and also connections to printers through working in the traditional print graphic design world of brochures, annual reports, and other marketing collateral.

It can seem cryptic and overwhelming to publish your own book. But just like anything else, once you know about 10 or 12 things the mysteries subsides and the possibility comes into focus. Here’s those things as it relates to creating the interior contents:

Facebook messenger and Google Messages for text management

When we first started putting the book together, we imagined that the bulk of the content would be lawanna writing about the killing of Prince Akbar.

She a night owl so she would text me large blocks of content over Facebook Messenger and then plain old text. Both of those platforms allow for mass copy / paste of content so I would wake up, review the text, and pasted into a Google doc.

Google Docs

The interior of the book was created solely inside Google Docs. One of the great features is that you can do page setup and select a standard book format for the entire document automatically. The book is five by 5 x 8.5″, which is a standard format– that reduces printing costs.

I didn’t futz with any of the other settings because I wanted to focus more on the content and I’m not a very good designer.

I did choose typefaces (SL helped with that) but there really was minimal design– no individual kerning and leading. The only thing that I did focus on was pagination and consistency across chapters. This is essential to creating a coherent feel for the book when it’s in your hands. The pattern of images, captions, chapters always starting on the left hand side with a full spread, things along those lines.

Because this is a physical thing so you have to remember that there will be empty pages if you don’t create the proper layouts. For example, there is one page in the book that is 11 point type instead of 12 because I had to fit everything under a single page without having a widow.

Google Pixel 6 camera and Google Lens

This majority of the content of this book  came from photographs I took of original pieces of paper maintained by Lajuana over the years.

The process was stunningly simple. We would meet somewhere, she would show me what pieces she wanted in the book where, and I would take pictures of every page with my phone.

Later I would crop the pages, rotate them so the were right side up, and then view them using Google Lens. This magical piece of software detects any text and allows me to select and copy all of the text on a page to my computer paste.

This way I would prepare the text on my phone, go to my computer, hit paste in the spot where I wanted it to be in the book, and the entire contents of the page would appear in the manuscript.

This way I able to extract all of the text out of printout of a two-column blog post faxed to Lajuana in 2010 at the Dwight Correctional Center from the Sinsinawa Dominican Catholic Sisters in Wisconsin.

I’m sure this is not mind-blowing to some of you but I’m still absolutely gobsmacked that this exists. There’s no way I could have laid in all this text without this tool.

Tomorrow: tools and methods for making the cover.