Notes on the desk

Why it exists

Most tools for “making a book” are either Microsoft Word with extra buttons, or a publishing dashboard that wants a title before you have a poem. Folio starts at the pieces. The book is what you get when the pieces have weather and an order.

The job is finished when two PDFs can go to KDP without a surprise on trim, spine, or type. Everything else is in service of that, or of keeping the desk quiet enough to write at.

The desk, not the cloud

There is no account. The collection lives in the browser. You can download a save file and open it later; that file is the backup.

Accounts would imply a server that holds Joyce’s drafts. Folio does not need that to order poems. Sign-in stays off unless the work itself is sharing between people. A high score in local storage is not a reason for a login, and neither is a chapbook.

Infer, feedback mail, and Proof’s grammar pass use the network. The manuscript does not.

Four kinds, one rail

A new book picks a type: poetry, short stories, recipes, or a journal. The type changes layout, copy, and what prints. It does not invent a second product.

Poetry was first. Stories and journals borrowed the mood rail because weather still describes a piece better than “Part two.” Recipes refused moods: a label is a kitchen fact, and it stays off the printed page so the book does not say Keto on the soufflé.

The same sequence, the same package, the same quiet chrome. Kind copy (poem / story / entry / recipe) is the only fork that should show.

Moods instead of chapters

A chapbook is rarely Chapter One. It is Light, then Grief, then Fire. The rail is eight weathers — Light, Joy, Love, Wonder, Still, Grief, Dark, Fire — plus any custom bubble you add.

Tone on a bubble is a lightness from shadow to bright. The bar graph of the book uses that light as light, not as a pretty hue that flips in the night theme. Grief stays in shadow on paper and at night. That was a deliberate fix: dark mode must not reverse the weather.

You may tag a piece with more than one mood. It still prints once, under the first mood on the rail. Dual-tagging is for placement, not for reprinting the same poem in two sections. Unplaced pieces sit at the end until they have weather.

Infer reads the whole piece and suggests one to three moods. It is a suggestion. You can ignore it, assign by hand, or add a bubble the inferrer has never heard of. Custom moods join the rail and the inferrer. Theme pages do not: Infer never sees a section leaf.

Sequence is the book

The sequence panel is the table of contents you can drag. Order inside a mood is the order in the paperback. The rail order is the order of sections.

We do not keep a parallel “pages” list. A second collection would drift from the poems. Theme-change pages live on the mood: optional heading and a line. Blank skips the leaf. That way a weather change can open with a quiet title page without anyone making a fake poem named “II. Fire.”

Dedication is front matter, not a mood. It sits after copyright and before contents. Blank skips it. Letters, prefaces, and afterwords were asked for as bookends; the first slice we shipped is dedication plus the weather leaf, because that covers most of “a page when the weather changes” without a page factory.

Quiet chrome

The top used to hold too much. The quieter bar keeps Folio, the book name, New, File, Book, and a small More. File is the pile (import, save). Book is the object (manuscript, package, examples). The previous header is one toggle away and was not deleted.

The book name on the left of the home mark stays Folio. The manuscript title is the book on the desk, and that is what KDP gets. Those are different names on purpose: the desk is Folio, the paperback is Meet Me at the Bend.

Type and paper

The interior is Libre Baskerville, embedded, because a poetry PDF that substitutes fonts is not a book. Screen UI is Fraunces and Figtree, warm, not a dashboard.

Print margins are inner 0.85″ and outer 0.75″ — the gutter is the wider one. No bleed on the interior. KDP wants an even page count of at least 24. Cream paper is the default; spine width uses Amazon’s own figures (cream 0.0025″ per page, white 0.002252″). Cover wrap includes 0.125″ bleed and a barcode well.

Trim defaults to 6 × 9 in, the usual trade paperback. 5.5 × 8.5 and 5 × 8 remain. Joyce’s first failed cover was 5.5 × 8.5 files uploaded to a 6 × 9 title. The package now says the trim in plain type and asks you to match KDP exactly.

Cover art is composed on the desk from title and weather, or a photograph you crop, or type alone. No image model. A picture should be hers, or a quiet geometric jacket, not a generated sunflower unless she brought the sunflower.

Packaging for KDP, not publishing

Amazon does not let anyone else press Publish. There is no public KDP API for a paperback. Logging into kdp.amazon.com for the author would be against their terms and would need a password Folio should never hold.

So Folio stops at a package:

• Interior PDF, no bleed, the sequence as printed — always free to take
• Wrap-cover PDF, back + spine + front, sized to the page count
• A paste card: title, subtitle, author, description, imprint, ISBN, print options, page count, spine, cover size
• A zip of those two PDFs plus kdp.txt
• A link to KDP. The author still logs in.

The wrap, the zip, and the paste card are the jacket. They wait on a small payment, or a desk code. The interior does not.

The leftover work after the files is retyping and matching print options. The paste card is that work. Autosubmit is not.

Proof, then Stet

Proof is optional, at the end of a piece, not on every keystroke, not on the whole manuscript. Three checks: spelling, syntax, grammar.

It does not rewrite. A finding is a phrase, a suggestion, Use or Stet. Stet is the proofreader’s mark: let it stand.

Spelling of obvious typos runs on the desk so a slow editor cannot hide teh. Syntax and grammar may ask a short remote read; that read is capped. If it is slow, the desk notes still show. The spinner is not allowed to sit for half a minute.

Poetry is not prose. A lyric that never uses periods is not a pile of errors. Folio flags a lowercase word after a stop, and a two-line sentence that started with a capital and never ended. It does not demand a period on Kitchen Window.

What we refused

• Accounts, for a manuscript that can live in a save file.
• Autosubmit to Amazon. The files, the numbers, the paste card. Not the password.
• A second Pages library. Inserts that need a home sit on the mood or in front matter.
• Infer on theme pages. A section leaf is not a poem.
• Mood colors that flip at night. Weather is light, not a theme token.
• Hollow Press as an uneditable brand. It is a Publisher field. Folio is the desk.
• Rewriting the piece because Proof had an opinion. Stet exists.

How a book leaves the desk

1. New book, a kind, a title that is not Folio.
2. Pieces on the desk — typed, imported, split from a manuscript.
3. Weather, by hand or inferred, custom bubbles if the rail is wrong.
4. Sequence: drag until the book reads.
5. Dedication if you have one; a page on a mood if the weather needs a door.
6. Cover: compose or a photograph, crop, trim, paper.
7. Package for KDP. Build. Take the interior. Take the jacket when it is yours. Copy the print line.
8. Open KDP. Match trim, paper, ink, no bleed. Upload interior, upload wrap. Preview. Price. Publish.

The desk stays. The paperback is elsewhere.

A note on names

Folio is the product, the mark at the top left, the save format, the creator string inside the PDF.

The book is whatever is on the desk today: Folio the sample chapbook, Night Buses, The Kitchen Book, The Desk, or the title Joyce types.

Hollow Press is only a default imprint and can be changed.

Joyce is the first reader the desk was built for. The footer’s quiet question is for her. The rest of the desk is for anyone assembling a small book.

Orion and Grok built it together. The update log is the short memory. This note is the longer one.