I'm not sure if this is npm official, or it's a lerna thing, but we can define publishConfig.directory to be used as --contents.

Before few days when I was playing with pika, I was using that field because pika creates pkg/ dir, so when I want to publish manually (without cd-ing to pkg dir) I need that field. But because pika copied that field too, my packages was broken, because in the pkg/ dir there's no another pkg dir.

So, basically, just when handling the manifest thing, delete the directory field from publishConfig.