This week we’re getting into the features that actually make Cowork powerful enough to justify the subscription. There are three concepts to understand: Connectors, Skills, and Plugins. They sound more technical than they are, and by the end of this newsletter you’ll know what each one does, how they relate to each other, and which ones matter for where you are right now.

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Connectors: How Claude Talks to Your Other Apps

A connector is exactly what it sounds like — a bridge between Claude and another app you use. When you connect Google Drive, Claude can read and search your files without you copying and pasting content into a chat window. When you connect Gmail, it can search your email, find threads, and draft replies. When you connect Google Calendar, it can check your schedule and add events.

Without connectors, Claude is stuck in the same copy-paste loop you’ve been in with every chatbot: you manually bring information to it, and you manually take information back out. Connectors let Claude go get what it needs and put things where they belong.

To set one up, open the Claude desktop app, go to Customize, and you’ll see a directory of official connectors — Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Zoom, Notion, Slack, Stripe, Zapier, and a list that keeps growing. Click “add,” sign into your account, and you’re connected. Claude can now read from and write to that service.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you might remember my deep dives on MCP servers. Connectors and MCP servers are the same thing with different names. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol (you absolutely do not need to remember that) — it’s just the technical term for how Claude connects to other apps. When Anthropic builds an official connector and puts it in that directory, they’re packaging up an MCP connection with a friendly button and some security vetting so you don’t have to think about the plumbing.

Beyond the official connectors, Claude let’s you also configure Personal connectors, which are available by first connecting a Marketplace link provided by the plugin developer, or uploading a plugin. My preference is a Marketplace link because the plugin can be configured to remain in sync with the developer.

Web Connectors vs. Desktop Connectors (Yes, They’re Different, and Yes, It’s Confusing)

This trips people up, so I want to lay it out clearly — and acknowledge that even I find this part messy.

There are two types of connectors: web connectors and desktop connectors. Web connectors run on the company’s servers in the cloud. Desktop connectors install something on your local machine and run from there. Both types can be set up inside the Claude desktop app through Cowork, which is where the confusion starts — you’re in the desktop app, but some of the connectors you’re adding are web-based and some are local.

The practical difference matters more than the technical one. Web connectors generally work the same on every machine because they’re running on someone else’s server. Desktop connectors can be finicky because they sometimes require additional software installed on your computer (things like Node or Bun, which are developer tools that most authors have never heard of and shouldn’t need to care about). Whether a desktop connector works smoothly can also depend on whether you’re on Mac or Windows, because the two operating systems don’t always play nice with the same configuration.

I learned this the hard way with authorautomations.social. We originally built it as a desktop connector, and it worked great on Mac because 99% of Macs ship with the software we used for the connector. Then Windows users started testing it from behindVPNs and we hit inconsistencies that were frustrating for the users to troubleshoot. So we rebuilt it as a web connector, and the cross-platform headaches went away. We lost a tiny bit of functionality, but it was worth the trade-off.

My prediction (and keep in mind that we are still in the genuinely early days of all of this): most companies you’d want to connect to will have official web connectors soon. The direction this is heading is toward click-to-connect web connectors that work regardless of your operating system, and desktop connectors will become more of a power-user option for custom setups. In the meantime, if you run into a connector that’s giving you grief during setup, it’s probably a desktop connector with a dependency your machine is missing. Drop a note in the Discord and we’ll help you sort it out.

The One-Account Limitation (And How to Get Around It Safely)

One thing worth knowing about official connectors: most currently support one account per service. So if you have three Google accounts (I have approximately 4,000, which is a me problem), the official Google Drive connector lets you connect exactly one of them.

For most authors with a single Google account, this is a non-issue. For those of you juggling a personal account and a business account, or multiple pen name accounts, it’s a real limitation — and this is where third-party connectors enter the picture.

There are developers out there building connectors that solve specific problems like this, and some of them are genuinely good. The challenge is that this space is the wild west right now, and you need to know how to vet what you’re installing before you give it access to your Google account (or your email, or your files, or anything else you care about).

For example, if you Google “MCP server for multiple Google accounts,” one of the first results is a listing on mcpmarket.com for a multi-account Google connector. No shade to the developer — it might be a perfectly fine product. But when I look at the details, the developer has one follower, and the underlying software repository has one star. That tells me almost nobody has reviewed this code, and I’m not comfortable connecting my Google accounts through it.

Compare that with the google_workspace_mcp connector by Taylor Wilsdon, which is what I use and what I walked through at the AI Summit (including a separate video step-by-step I recorded after because everyone asked for it!). That repository has 2,300+ stars and over 700 developers contributing to the code. That level of community involvement means a lot of eyes have looked at this software, a lot of people are actively using it, and problems get found and fixed quickly.

When you’re evaluating any third-party connector, look at the GitHub repository behind it. 99% of developers use Github. Check the star count (think of these as votes of confidence from other developers), check how many contributors are involved, and check when it was last updated. A connector with thousands of stars and recent activity is a very different proposition than one with a single star from the person who built it. You’re potentially handing these tools a lot of power — treat that decision the way you’d treat giving someone a key to your house.

Skills: Teaching Claude to Do Things Your Way

Connectors give Claude access. Skills tell Claude what to do with that access and how to do it the way you want.

A skill is a saved set of instructions — think of it as a recipe card for a specific task. It includes what the task is, how you want it done, what tools to use, what your preferences are, and what standards to apply. When you activate a skill, Claude follows those instructions instead of making its own assumptions about how you’d like things handled.

I have over 100 skills at this point, and that’s genuinely where I think everyone should be heading. Every repeatable task in your business is a candidate for a skill, because every skill you create is one less time you have to explain yourself from scratch.

My Brevo Mastermind Newsletter skill drafts my weekly newsletter to my mastermind group with the right tone, format, and sign-off every time. It also scans my Notion for things I’ve added throughout the week that I wanted to remember to tell them about, because my neurospicy brain is not going to hold onto the thing I really, really wanted to mention by the time Thursday rolls around. I just toss it into Notion whenever I think of it and let the skill find it when it’s time to draft.

My Update WooCommerce Products skill, combined with a project in Cowork, knows that my covers are in a specific folder on my computer and my book copy is in Airtable. Because both are connected, it goes and gets everything it needs — the cover image, the description, the metadata — and adds the new book to my online store. (You could do the same thing with Shopify, Payhip, or whatever you use to sell direct.)

My Email Triage skill has my instructions for how to sort, prioritize, and respond to email across all my accounts, and we go 1×1 twice a day (with a scheduled task we’ll talk about in future posts because those deserve their own detail, and a small parade to celebrate them) and respond, archive, defer based on rules in the skill and detail from my second brain in Obsidian and Notion.

Each skill tells Claude exactly how I want that type of work done, and that specificity matters more than you’d think. Without a skill, I can absolutely say “go get my book copy out of Airtable” in a regular chat, and Claude will try — but it might take 15 attempts of hunting and pecking around my tables and fields before it finds the right one. That eats up your tokens (which cost money or count against your plan limits) and your time. With a skill, I’ve pre-defined which Airtable base, which table, and which field to pull from, so Claude goes straight to it on the first try.

Start with one. Pick the task you do most often — maybe it’s drafting social media posts, or formatting your newsletter, or summarizing reader feedback — and start a conversation with Claude in Cowork. Say something like “interview me about how I do this task, what tools I use, and how I want the output to look.” Claude will ask you questions, and when you’re done, it’ll save a skill you can reuse every time you do that task.

The part I love most about skills is that you don’t have to go back into the settings to update them. If you’re chatting with Cowork throughout the day and you realize a skill is missing something, just say “hey, add this to my copywriting skill as a non-negotiable rule.” Claude updates the skill for you, right there in the conversation. You’re teaching it incrementally, the same way you’d train a real assistant — one correction at a time, in the flow of actual work. Change your mindset from “I need to go edit a settings file” to “I need to tell my assistant to update their notes.”

Plugins: Where Skills and Connectors Come Together

Plugins are bigger than a single skill or a single connector. They’re bundles that can combine skills, connectors, agents, hooks, monitors, themes, and other server functions into a package that works together for a specific purpose.

The easiest way to understand this is through an example. AuthorAutomations.social has a plugin that bundles two things: skills for creating carousels, Reels, and TikToks with trending music from inside Cowork, and the web connector that posts them to your social accounts when you’re done. The skill is the framework — it works with Claude on how something gets created, what format it takes, what dimensions to use. The connector is the pipe — it delivers the finished product to where it needs to go. The plugin wraps both of those together so you’re not configuring them separately.

I think plugins are where this ecosystem gets really interesting over the next year, especially for business intelligence. I’ve suggested that Author Nation build a plugin, for example, that will have the framing and theme of this year’s conference built in (speakers were announced yesterday, and Joe Solari explained the theme and how the philosophy is adapting in this YouTube Live) along with a way to incorporate what each speaker presented.

But Chelle, you ask, isn’t this just a chatbot? No. It’s a business intelligence source incorporated into your own business.

This of it like this: You’re working on your Facebook Ads. Claude knows your analytics and spend from a connector to StorytellerOS (or Meta, or another connector). It knows your personal objectives from your second brain, Notion. And now it knows the things you learned at Author Nation from the smartest people in the industry, and it can create new ads or update your existing ones based on that intelligence, and your personal analytics and objectives.

It’s early days for plugins, but it gives you a sense of where plugins are heading — pre-built packages of expertise and context that you can connect to Claude.

Imagine a stoicism skill from Ryan Holiday, or the “Badass” series from Jen Sincero packaged as a plugin you could connect to your business planning workflow. Those don’t exist yet, but they should, and I’d be genuinely surprised if we don’t see things like that within the next six months. The infrastructure for it is already here — someone just needs to build them. (And if you’re reading this and thinking “I could build that,” come talk to me in the Vibe Coding Discord.)

How It All Fits Together

Think about the relationship between these three things this way:

Connectors (really just MCP servers or API connectors — same thing, different name) are the roads between Claude and your apps. They handle the “can Claude reach this service” question. Official connectors in the directory are just connections with a friendly button and some security vetting on top.

Skills are the driving instructions. They handle the “once Claude gets there, what does it do and how does it do it” question. Without skills, Claude uses its own judgment about how to handle tasks. With skills, it follows your playbook.

Plugins are the full trip planned out — a bundle of roads and driving instructions (and sometimes other components) packaged together for a specific purpose. AuthorAutomations.social’s plugin gives you both the creative skills and the posting connector in one install.

Where This Is Going Next Week

Next week we’re talking about Projects — how to set up your workspace so you give Claude access to what it needs and keep it away from what it doesn’t. There’s a heavy emphasis on security, access, and knowledge management, because the way you organize your Claude environment determines how useful (or how chaotic) the whole experience is. We’ll cover options for “second brains” including Obsidian, Notion, and Google Workspace, and I’ll walk you through how I have my executive assistant structured so it knows where everything lives across my business.

In the meantime, if you haven’t downloaded the Claude desktop app yet, this is the week to do it. Everything we’re building toward in this series lives there.

Reply and tell me: what’s the first app you’d want Claude to connect to, and what would you have it do there? I read every one.

—Chelle

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

By the end of Day One, people were connecting Airtable to Claude Cowork and chatting about their 300+ backlist and series bible details. By Day Two, attendees were chatting with their email, setting up scheduled tasks to update their websites, and a few brave souls had hacked it to update their Scrivener docs, and clean their Mailerlite email lists. Someone else hooked up their Facebook Ads and rebuilt their entire strategy with new images and video they created. (I love you people.)

And then there were the social media shifts. They learned how to connect AuthorAutomations.social inside Claude Cowork and create and schedule all their posts from a chat window —including images, videos, infographics, carousels, and yes, Trial Reels (which seems to be moving the needle, according to some authors chatting about it in Wide for the Win!)

The shift we talked about all week was the move from chatting with AI to having AI take action on your behalf — with your permission, your guardrails, and your rules. That’s what agentic means, and it landed for a lot of people. Let me remind you if feel like you’re behind — only 2% of the world is actually using AI in their business. 2%. You’re officially an early adopter living in the future.

I’m going to break a lot of what we covered in this newsletter over this series, but if you want the cheat code (and save weeks of waiting for me to write) then replay packages for all 15 sessions + access to Discord are available at https://aisummit.indieauthortraining.com.

We also have three things coming up on the calendar. On April 29 at 11am Central, I’m doing an overview of StorytellerOS for anyone who wants to see the full platform in action. On May 5 from 1-3pm Central, we’re running a hands-on session on Claude Cowork for Ads Management. And every Wednesday at 12 noon Central, I’m hosting an Author Automations Social Getting Started session if you want help setting up the social scheduler and connecting it to your workflows.

Register for any or all of the webinars at https://webinars.indieauthortraining.com

Last week we broke down the differences between Claude Chat, Cowork, and Code.

One of the biggest questions after that was a version of “okay, I get that there are three Claudes, but where do I actually start?” This newsletter is the answer. We’re going to walk through the differences between the desktop app and the web version, talk about what a terminal is (for those of you who need it), and then set up the two concepts that make Claude Cowork and Claude Code genuinely powerful: Skills and Connectors. Next week, we’ll go deeper into both of those.

Desktop App vs. Web: Start With the Desktop

If you only take one thing from this newsletter, make it this: download the Claude desktop app and use that instead of the website, if you can.

The web version at claude.ai is fine for chatting. You can ask questions, paste in text, get answers — it works the same way it always has. But when you move to Cowork (the part where Claude can actually do things on your computer), the desktop app is where everything lives. Cowork in the desktop app can read files and folders on your machine, create and edit documents in place, connect to your tools through connectors, run scheduled tasks, build “live artifacts” (which are dashboards, but better), and access the skills you build to teach it how you work.

The web version can’t do most of that because it doesn’t have access to your local files. It runs in what’s called a sandbox up in the cloud, which means it can’t see your desktop, your documents folder, or any of the configuration you’ve done on your machine. Your skills don’t transfer to the web automatically either — you can manually set them up there, but it’s not reliable and you’ll spend more time troubleshooting than actually getting work done.

During the summit, someone asked about the pros and cons of desktop vs. web, and my answer was pretty simple: if you’re just chatting, either one works. If you want Claude to actually do things for you, desktop app every time.

To get it, go to claude.ai, look in the bottom left corner for “Get apps and extensions,” and download it for your Mac or PC. You’ll want at least the $20/month Pro plan to access Cowork, and if you end up being a power user (you’ll know when you get there), the $100/month plan gives you a lot more capacity.

About That Desktop App I Used to Hate

I need to make a confession here because some of you have been reading this newsletter long enough to remember that I was not exactly a fan of the Claude desktop app a month ago, and I didn’t recommend Cowork at all. It was buggy. Cowork was unimpressive. I had real concerns about whether Anthropic was going to get this right.

They got it right.

The improvement in the last four to six weeks has been dramatic, and I’m not using that word casually. The desktop app went from something I tolerated to something I rely on for hours a day. I see the “Relaunch to update” notification on my screen so often that I’m starting to wonder if Anthropic’s engineering team sleeps.

They are shipping updates at a pace I have never seen from a software company in nearly three decades of working in technology, and every update makes it noticeably better.

If you tried the desktop app a month ago and walked away frustrated, go back. The version you tried and the version that exists today are almost unrecognizable from each other, and the version that exists tomorrow will probably be better than both.

Terminal Access: For When You Need Claude Code

Most of you will live in Cowork and never need to think about this section. But if you’re on a version of Windows that won’t run the desktop app, or if you want to graduate to Vibe coding with Claude Code (the more powerful sibling that can connect to your servers, databases, and basically anything with a login), you’ll need to use what’s called a terminal.

Quick aside: Yes, there is a version of Claude Code on the Desktop App. Yes, it’s pretty good, and you can use it for a lot of cool things. But not #allthethings. So if you’re not yet able to use Cowork, or want to unlock Code’s full potential, read on for hooking up the version that’s called Claude CLI (Command Line Interface).

For the GenX kids: you already know what this is, even if the word “terminal” doesn’t ring a bell. Remember DOS? Remember that black screen with the blinking cursor where you typed C:\> dir to see your files and C:\> OREGON.EXE to die of dysentery on the trail to Oregon? That’s a terminal. It’s a text-based way to talk to your computer by typing commands instead of clicking on icons. Your Mac has one built in (it’s called Terminal, creatively enough), and Windows has a couple of options called Command Prompt and PowerShell.

I use an app called Warp instead of the built-in terminal, and I recommend it if you’re going down this road. Warp is a modern terminal that doesn’t look like it was designed in 1987 — it has autocomplete, it’s easier to read, and it doesn’t make you feel like you accidentally hacked into NORAD. It’s free, it works on Mac (and Windows support is available too), and it makes the Claude Code experience significantly less intimidating. It has a built-in AI you can chat with to ask it to help you do things like, “Hey, install Claude Code for me” and then “Be sure I can run Claude Code everywhere on my computer.” and “Hey, can you make me a latte?”

Give Anthropic like maybe 20 minutes and that one might be a reality.

If you get stuck, drop a message in the Discord and we’ll help you get sorted. Or grab one of the upcoming sessions where we’ll walk through it live.

Projects: Your First Move in the Desktop App

Once you have the desktop app installed, the first thing to do is create a Project. Projects are how you bundle related conversations, files, and context together so Claude remembers what you’re working on across multiple chats.

Think of it this way: without a project, every conversation with Claude starts from scratch. It doesn’t remember your last chat, your preferences, or what you told it about your book series yesterday. With a project, you create a container where Claude has ongoing context about a specific area of your work.

You might create a project for your book launch, another for your newsletter, another for your backlist marketing. Inside each project, you can attach reference documents — your brand guide, your blurb, your series bible, whatever Claude needs to give you useful answers without you re-explaining everything each time.

During the summit, I walked through how my own projects are organized, and the main takeaway was that projects are the difference between Claude being a generic chatbot and Claude being an executive assistant that actually knows your business. If you’re just getting started, skip regular chat entirely and go straight to creating one project for the area of your business where you spend the most time.

The Two Things That Make Cowork Powerful

Cowork on its own is already useful — you point it at a folder, describe what you want, and it gets to work. But the features that turn it from a nice-to-have into something that can genuinely run parts of your business are Skills and Connectors.

Connectors are how Claude talks to your other tools. When you go into Customize in the desktop app, you’ll see a directory of approved connectors — Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, Slack, Stripe, Zapier, n8n, and a growing list that gets longer every week. Connecting one is as simple as clicking “add” and signing into your account. Once connected, Claude can read from and write to that service without you having to copy and paste between windows.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you might remember my deep dives on MCP servers. Connectors are the friendly, click-to-install version of that same concept. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol (you don’t need to remember that), and it’s the bridge that lets Claude talk to your apps without needing to understand the technical details of each one. The official connectors in the directory have been vetted by Anthropic, so they’re the safest place to start. For those of you who want to go further and connect things that aren’t in the official directory (like authorautomations.social), you can set up personal connectors, which we covered extensively during the summit and which I’ll walk through in detail next week.

One limitation worth knowing: the official connectors currently only support one account per service. So if you have multiple Google accounts (I have approximately 4,000, which is a me problem), you’re limited to connecting one through the official connector. There are workarounds for this using personal connectors and Claude Code, and I’ll cover those in a future installment.

Skills are how you teach Claude to do things your way. A skill is basically a set of instructions — a recipe card, if you will — that tells Claude how to handle a specific type of task with your preferences, your voice, your tools, and your standards baked in.

I have over 100 skills at this point, which is admittedly excessive. I have a developmental editor skill, a line editor skill, a continuity specialist skill, a pen name architect skill, a series architect skill, a copywriting skill, and on and on. Each one contains specific instructions about how I want that task done, which tools to use, where to put the output, and what standards to apply.

You don’t need 100 skills. You need one. Pick the task you do most often — maybe it’s drafting social media posts, or summarizing your reader feedback, or formatting your newsletter — and start a conversation with Claude in Cowork. Say “interview me about how I do this task, what tools I use, and how I want the output to look.” Claude will ask you questions, and when you’re done, you’ll have a skill you can save and reuse every time you do that task.

The beautiful part about skills (and this came up several times during the summit) is that you don’t have to go back into the settings menu to update them. If you’re chatting with Cowork throughout the day and you realize the skill is missing something, just say “hey, add this to my copywriting skill as a non-negotiable rule.” Claude updates the skill for you. You’re teaching it incrementally, the same way you’d train a real assistant — one correction at a time, in the flow of actual work.

Where This Series Is Headed

Next week, I’m going deeper on Skills and Connectors with specific walkthroughs for authors. I’ll show you how to set up your first connector (we’ll start with Google Drive since nearly everyone uses it), how to create a skill from scratch by having Claude interview you, and how the two work together to turn Cowork from a fancy chatbot into something that actually handles repeatable tasks in your business. I’ll also touch on a big one —how to manage some security and risk with connectors and skills.

If you came to the summit, next week’s newsletter will feel like a practical follow-up to what you saw in the MCP Servers and Skills session. If you didn’t make it to the summit, you’ll have everything you need to get started.

Reply and tell me: what’s the first task you’d want to teach Claude to do your way? I read every one.

—Chelle

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’ve been getting the same question from about forty different directions since Ireland: “What is Claude Code and why won’t you shut up about it.” (Fair.) So I made two things.

A 45-minute video where I break down all three Claude tools, do a live demo, and walk through the weekend I handed Claude Code my entire Notion task backlog and sat in my easy chair while it worked through 100+ tasks. It’s 45 minutes of me being thorough and slightly unhinged. That one’s for the people who learn by watching someone push buttons and gasp.

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This newsletter, which covers the same ground in about eight minutes of reading. No buffering required.

If you consume both, there’s overlap — that’s on purpose, not early-onset memory loss. (Though ask me again in a few years.) Pick whichever fits your capacity.

Most of you have used Claude. You’ve opened claude.ai, typed a question, gotten an answer. Maybe you’ve used it to brainstorm plot points, draft a blurb, or ask why your Mailerlite automation isn’t firing. (It’s always the trigger. Always.)

That version of Claude — the chatbot in a browser — is one of three tools Anthropic makes now. The other two are where things get interesting for running your author business. And almost nobody in the indie author space is explaining them clearly, because the people who use them are mostly developers writing for other developers.

I’m an old-school programmer — DOS, COBOL, C++ back in the Y2K and Code Red Mountain Dew era. I stepped away from coding for a long time, and Claude Code brought me back. Not as a developer, exactly, but as a product manager who can build things again. That’s a distinction worth understanding, and I’ll come back to it later in this series. For now, let me translate the three tools into author-friendly language.

Hey, real quick: if you’re also into vibe coding, I have a Discord Channel to come hang out with a nerd herd: https://discord.gg/MZKACmjSjs

The Three Claudes, in Plain English Claude Chat is the one you know. You type, it responds, you copy-paste the output somewhere useful. It lives in your browser or the Claude app. Think of it as a very smart coworker who can only communicate through sticky notes — you hand one over, they hand one back.

Claude Cowork is the one most of you should care about right now. It launched in January 2026 and it lives in the Claude desktop app. You open it, point it at a folder on your computer, and say “do this.” It reads your files, creates new ones, edits existing ones, and works through multi-step tasks on its own — checking in with you along the way. If Claude Chat is a coworker who communicates through sticky notes, Cowork is a coworker who has a key to the office and can actually sit down at the desk and do the work.

Claude Code is Cowork’s more powerful (and more intimidating) sibling. It runs in your terminal (the black screen with the blinking cursor that makes you feel like you’re in a 90s hacker movie). It can write code, run commands, create files, connect to your databases, manage your servers — anything you could do from a command line, Claude Code can do for you. This is the tool I used to build AmandaBot, authorautomations.social, and most of the infrastructure that runs my business. It is extremely powerful and it looks like The Matrix. (It’s also how I scrapped my entire Ireland presentation and rebuilt it in an afternoon, which is a story for another installment.)

Here’s why that distinction matters: in Chat, you are the bottleneck. You copy text in, you copy text out, you paste it somewhere, you format it, you save it. Every step is a manual handoff. In Cowork, Claude handles the handoffs. You describe the outcome, and it produces deliverables — actual files, in your actual folder, ready to use. In Code, you can do everything in Cowork, and more.

When You’d Use Which This is the part I wish someone had spelled out for me six months ago instead of making me piece it together from developer Twitter threads.

Use Chat when you need a conversation. Brainstorming, Q&A, feedback on a blurb, “is this sentence grammatically correct or am I losing my mind.” Anything where the back-and-forth is the point.

Use Cowork when you have a task with a tangible output. You want a document created. Files organized. A spreadsheet built from scattered information. A batch of social media posts drafted and saved. Anything where you’d normally say “I need to sit down for an hour and just power through this” — that’s a Cowork job.

Use Code when you want to clone yourself. Chat answers questions. Cowork handles tasks. Code is where you build the systems that run your business while you’re not looking — the connectors that link Claude to your email, your website, your social platforms. The skills that teach it how you want things done. The agents that handle recurring work on your behalf. The hooks that trigger workflows automatically. This is how I built AmandaBot, and it’s how I run a publishing company, a training business, a magazine, and a social media platform from my iPad while traveling across two continents. Code is the infrastructure layer, and you don’t need a CS degree to use it. (I don’t have one. I have stubbornness and a COBOL background from the Reagan administration, which is arguably worse.)

Most authors will live in Chat and Cowork. That’s completely fine. Code is where you go when you’re ready to build the systems that let you stop doing the work and start overseeing it — and we’ll get there later in this series.

What This Actually Looks Like: A Real Example in Cowork Full disclosure: my own book organization lives in StorytellerOS now, so I don’t actually need Cowork for this particular task anymore. But I wanted to test it with something familiar so I could show you what the experience feels like — and a messy book launch folder is about as universal as it gets.

I had a folder on my desktop with everything for an upcoming book launch. Cover images in three sizes. A blurb document. A series overview. A few versions of taglines I’d been noodling on. Comp titles in a text file. Release date, preorder links, ISBNs — scattered across multiple docs because I am a chaotic creature who organizes by vibes.

I opened Cowork, pointed it at the folder, and said: “Read everything in here and create a complete book launch media kit. I need a one-sheet with the cover, blurb, comp titles, buy links, and author bio. Then create a separate file with 20 social media posts in my voice — mix of announcement posts, countdown posts, and reader-question posts. Save everything back into this folder.”

Cowork read every file. It figured out which cover was the final version (because I’d named it “FINAL-final-v3-USE-THIS” like a professional). It pulled the blurb, matched it to the comp titles, grabbed the links, and produced a clean one-sheet as a markdown file and 20 social posts in a separate document. Saved them right into my launch folder.

I reviewed the posts, tweaked maybe four of them, and moved on with my life.

The same task in Chat would have meant: open each document, copy the contents, paste them into the chat window one at a time (hoping I don’t hit the context limit), explain what I want, get the output back as text in a chat bubble, then copy it out and paste it into a new document, format it, and save it myself. Every handoff is manual. Every step is me.

In Cowork, I described the outcome and went to make coffee. (The espresso machine at home works. Unlike certain Regus locations I could name.)

Getting Started Cowork is available now in the Claude desktop app on Mac and Windows . You’ll need a Claude Pro subscription ($20/month) at minimum — it’s also available on Team and Enterprise plans.

To try it:

Download the Claude desktop app from claude.ai if you don’t have it

Open the app and click “Cowork” in the sidebar

Choose a folder to give Claude access to (start with something low-stakes — a folder of drafts, your book metadata, your launch files)

Give it a task in plain English

Watch it work and approve or redirect as it goes

Start small. “Organize these files by project” or “read this manuscript and create a chapter-by-chapter summary” or “build me a spreadsheet of all the ISBNs, titles, and publication dates from these documents.” Once you see what it can do with your own files, you’ll start seeing Cowork-shaped tasks everywhere.

Full Disclosure: It’s New, and It Shows Cowork is genuinely useful and I would not be writing a multi-part series about it if I didn’t believe that. I also need you to know that it is sometimes buggy as hell.

It doesn’t always do what you ask it to do. The Chrome browser takeover feature is a bit of a nightmare and will eat your tokens like chocolate chip cookies the day before you start Keto. It can be frustratingly dumb about connecting to all your tools, and while the interface is friendly enough, the troubleshooting and initial setup might make you want to toss your computer into the nearest body of water. (If you’re near a lake, I recommend a good overhead throw. Very cathartic.)

I’m telling you this now so you don’t hit your first wall and think you’re doing it wrong. You’re not. The tool is young. These are all pitfalls I’ll go over in depth across this series and at the AI Summit — what to expect, what to work around, and what to just wait for Anthropic to fix.

What’s Coming in This Series This is Part 1. Here’s where we’re headed:

Part 2: Cowork for Your Social Media — I’ll walk through using Cowork to generate and schedule social content for your books, including how it connects to authorautomations.social and the Claude plugin that lets you manage your posting calendar in plain English.

Part 3: Building Your First Claude Skill — Skills are reusable instructions that make Claude better at specific tasks — and they work in Cowork, not just Code. I’ll show you how to create one for your own writing or business workflow.

Part 4: Connectors — Giving Claude Access to Your Tools — Connectors are how Claude talks to the rest of your business. Email, Google Drive, your calendar, your social platforms. I’ll walk through what’s available, how to set them up, and which ones are worth your time right now.

Part 5: Clone Yourself with Claude Code — This is where you go from doing the work to building the systems that do the work for you. Connectors, skills, agents, and the infrastructure that lets you run a business from your iPad. I’ll show you what’s possible and where the on-ramp is. (I promised you I’d redo the walkthrough I recorded a few weeks ago with the new features, and I will.)

Part 6: The Agentic Author Stack — How all of this fits together. Chat, Cowork, Code, MCP servers, authorautomations.social, and the tools that connect them. The full picture of what it looks like to run an author business with AI agents handling the operations.

If there’s something specific you want me to cover, reply to this email. I read every one of them. (AmandaBot does too, but she’s polite enough not to spoil the answers.)

The summit is April 21–22. Day 1 is free. If you’ve been on the fence, this series will give you a head start on everything we’ll cover in the paid sessions on Day 2. Details at aisummit.indieauthortraining.com .

I’m back in Texas this week, reunited with my espresso machine and a desk that doesn’t require a subscription. Part 2 drops in a few days and not weekly. In the meantime, go download the Claude desktop app and point Cowork at your messiest folder. You’ll either be impressed or you’ll want to throw your laptop in a lake. Either way, you’ll have something to tell me about.

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I have a lot to process this time. And some of it changes this newsletter.

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ireland Was AI-Positive in a Way I Haven’t Seen Before At Ireland’s Publishing Show , several sessions — including mine — were explicitly labeled as AI sessions. Which meant the room was self-selected: people who showed up had moved past “should we” a long time ago and were ready to get into the how. We skipped the throat-clearing and went straight to the good stuff, which was honestly a relief after years of opening every talk with kindergarten rules: no biting, no hitting, no crying, and eyes on your own paper.

One speaker, Matthias Kadott, did something I loved: he created a brand new pen name specifically as a proof of concept for the conference. Started from scratch, wrote a book, deployed it to market including AI translations — and netted over €7,000 in a single month. As a demo. With receipts.

I don’t know about you, but I looked at that number and thought: okay, the landscape has genuinely shifted. The tools are here. The playbook is different. And people are already running it.

I Radically Changed My Own Presentation I was originally planning to teach my usual Make.com and Zapier workflows for managing social media. That’s been my bread and butter for two years. It’s what this newsletter was built on.

I scrapped it (with permission) and taught social media using agentic AI instead.

It felt a little strange, honestly. Like showing up to Thanksgiving with a completely different casserole and hoping nobody asks what happened to the old one. But I couldn’t in good conscience stand in front of a room and teach a three-step Make.com scenario when I know there’s a faster, more powerful way to do the same thing — and when I’ve already built it.

I still have Make.com and Zapier workflows running in my business. They’re solid for scheduled data transfers and on-demand tasks. I’m not throwing them away. But when I’m reaching for a tool now, my first choice is agentic AI and vibe-coded apps. That shift happened gradually over the last year and then very quickly over the last few months.

The Thing I Built That Replaced the Workflow Okay, here’s the concrete version.

I used to have a three-step Make.com workflow that required Airtable as a data source to create social media content from my books. It did the job. I taught it at conferences and in the Hub. People built their own versions of it.

I replaced it with authorautomations.social .

It creates 30 days of content in minutes — TikTok videos, carousels, captions — from your own books. Posts to 13 social media channels in your voice, with your content. The whole Airtable-to-Make pipeline that used to power this is gone. You don’t need it anymore.

It’s free for Founder subscribers and $29/month for everyone else.

And here’s the part that still makes me grin every time I demo it: there’s a Claude plugin for it. Which means you can sit in Claude and say, “Create 20 TikToks and post them to TikTok over the next week to promote Book 1 before Book 2 launches.” Claude reads the context on your own machine, generates the content, and uses authorautomations.social to schedule and post it.

You describe what you need in plain English. It happens. While you go write. Or nap. Or finally text back the friend you’ve been “meaning to reply to” since November. (Just me?)

This Newsletter Is Changing I’ve been wrestling with this for a while, and Ireland made it click.

Agentic AI is the single greatest opportunity for indie authors to build million-dollar creative careers. It can manage the entire operational side of your publishing business — marketing, social, newsletters, sales tracking, metadata, all of it — while you write. “Bots do the boring so you can do the brilliant” was always the tagline. It’s just that now the bots are significantly less boring and significantly more capable.

I’m not pivoting into writing-with-AI territory. There are stronger voices in that space and I’m happy to point you toward them. But Author Automations is now where you come to learn how to run your author business using agentic AI.

The name probably needs to change at some point. But 2026 is the year of contraction and I am exercising restraint for possibly the first time in my life. (Joanna Penn did just tell me I have a “popcorn brain,” so the restraint is relative.)

What Stays The Hub isn’t going anywhere. Plugins, extensions, templates — all still there, all still accessible. I’ll still post workflows for Make.com, N8N, and Zapier when they’re the right tool for the job. There will just be fewer of them, because most of the time I’m reaching for something else now.

What’s Coming A lot of webinars, and virtual live events. I’ll be back in Austin next week where the bandwidth is much better, and my espresso machine is about to get a workout. I’ll post a full calendar when I’m back, but for now you can plan on:

What’s all the fuss about Claude Code & CoWork? Claude Code and Cowork keep coming up and nobody’s explaining them well. I’m going to fix that — with a walkthrough built for authors, not developers (I recorded this a few weeks ago but things have changed and I want to update it with the new cool stuff)

authorautomations.social Deep Dive + the Claude Plugin — A full walkthrough of the app, including the Claude plugin that lets you manage your social media with natural language commands. I’ll show you exactly what it looks like to tell Claude to promote your book and watch it go do it.

Agentic AI for Book Launches — I’m going to map out what a launch looks like when AI agents are handling newsletter swaps, research, social scheduling, email sequences, ad monitoring, and sales tracking. Real examples from real launches, not a PowerPoint fantasy.

AI for Your Author Business Summit Preview — The summit is April 21–22. Day 1 is free. Day 2 is the deep dive into agentic AI and Claude Code. I’ll be sharing what to expect and how to get the most out of it.

The mix going forward will be tutorials and industry commentary — practical how-tos alongside the bigger conversations about where this industry is headed.

One More Thing I won’t be mad if these changes mean it’s time for you to unsubscribe.

I mean that. If you came here for Zapier recipes and Make.com walkthroughs and that’s still what you need, I respect that completely. The Hub content isn’t disappearing and those tools still work. But this newsletter is going somewhere different now, and I’d rather tell you that directly than slowly drift and leave you wondering what happened.

For those of you sticking around: the conversations I had in Ireland, at LBF, at ALLi, and in Savannah all confirmed something I’ve felt for months. The authors who figure out agentic AI in the next twelve months are going to operate at a completely different level. I want this to be the place where you figure it out.

Canterbury coffee remains deeply mid. But the WiFi works and nobody’s asking me to be on a panel, so I’ll take it.

—Chelle

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Six years later, we’re still doing it. I’m currently doing bougie couch surfing through their guest rooms and kitchens, and Princess Elowyn — the most brilliant child ever — gets to FaceTime with her aunties while Mimi “checks on her castles”. Irish, Scottish, English, Canadian, German, and Kuwaiti aunties. Best. Job. Ever.

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But between the home-cooked dinners and the pub crawls, which are surprisingly hard with a cane and a torn ligament, I’ve also been at the Savannah popup, London Book Fair, ALLi’s Indie Author Lab, and now Ireland’s Publishing Show. And I can tell you this: every indie author I’ve talked to is having some version of the same conversation.

Discoverability and longevity.

Those two words came up everywhere. In panels. In hallways. Over dinner. In those hushed side conversations where someone grabs your elbow and says, “Okay, but seriously. What do I do?”

So this week, I want to tell you what I’m seeing out here — and where I think authors need to be having these conversations instead of spiraling alone.

(Spoiler: not Threads.)

Authors Are Tired in a Very Specific Way Authors have always been tired. That’s not new.

But this is a specific flavor of tired: I’m doing seventeen jobs instead of seven and the goalposts keep moving tired.

Tony Lee said something at the Author Nation conference in 2025 that has stuck with me ever since: we’re publishers that write, not writers that publish. I quote it constantly now because that framing changes how you think about all of this.

If you’re running a publishing business, the path to longevity stops looking romantic and starts looking operational. The authors I keep seeing thrive over the long haul aren’t superhuman. They’re the ones who have systemized their workflows, delegated where they can, and automated what they can. The ones trying to manually carry every moving piece themselves are flaming out by year three.

Translations. Wide distribution. Ads on platforms that change their interface every time you finally learn the old one. Social media across channels you can barely keep straight anymore. Direct sales. Email sequences. Print logistics. Newsletter swaps. And now everyone’s standing on stages telling authors they also need to learn AI.

(I say this with full awareness that I am one of the people standing on those stages. The irony is not lost on me.)

At the Savannah popup, I sat with authors who are executing at a really high level — gorgeous covers, deep backlists, consistent releases — and the conversations weren’t about craft. They were about noise.

The rising volume of content on every platform. The suspicion. The friendly fire. Authors being accused — sometimes falsely — of using tools or processes they didn’t use. A lot of people are guarded right now. About their workflows, their teams, their tech, their everything. Because they just don’t want the smoke.

I get it.

But it’s also making it harder for authors to learn from each other, which is exactly what we need more of right now.

London Felt Different This Year At London Book Fair, something had shifted.

For years, indie publishing showed up as the scrappy younger sibling. Trad was the default, and we were still proving ourselves. This year, that wasn’t the vibe anymore. We had a much bigger presence. A much louder voice. More panels, more attendees, more genuine curiosity from the trad side about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

That doesn’t mean the anxiety wasn’t there. Retailer changes came up constantly — in panels, in the exhibitor halls, at the pub afterward. People were speculating about policy changes, algorithm shifts, AI detection, discoverability. Whether the platform that built most of our careers is still the one we can count on long term. Nobody had clear answers.

But the energy wasn’t defeatist. It was more like: okay, we’re here now, we’re not going anywhere, and we’re going to figure this out together.

One bright spot that kept surfacing: translations.

That conversation has moved way past should I translate? That’s settled. Authors are earning real money in translated markets now. Tools like ScribeShadow , plus things like James Blatch’s AI for Translations course , are shrinking the speed-versus-accuracy tradeoff that used to make people hesitate.

The conversation now is: how do I do this well? Which languages? Which markets? How do I maintain quality at scale?

(For what it’s worth, I’m firmly in the “test two or three languages before you go full United Nations” camp. Scaling something that doesn’t work just gives you more of what doesn’t work, faster.)

And underneath all of it — translation, discoverability, direct sales, ads, AI — the question that kept surfacing was the only one that actually matters:

What do readers want?

What are they reaching for? What are they buying? What are they sticking with? And how do we make sure we’re in the mix when they go looking?

That’s the question that should be driving every strategic decision, and I was genuinely encouraged to hear it being asked that directly.

ALLi Had the Most Useful Answer ALLi’s Indie Author Lab was where the conversation got the most grounded.

Orna Ross , Melissa Addey , and Joanna Penn were all refreshingly clear: figure out your own path.

Get clear on your priorities. Figure out where your energy actually comes from. Simplify your workflows around that. Do the right things for your business, on purpose, and let go of the rest.

That message landed because it wasn’t about adding more. It was about subtracting.

Direct sales and human interaction came up over and over. Authors selling direct — through their own stores, at live events, on TikTok, through email, through actual relationships with readers — are the ones seeing the needle move. Not because it’s trendy, but because it creates something we should all be thinking about more seriously:

Ownership of the reader relationship.

Because if your entire business depends on an algorithm you don’t control, you don’t have a business. You have an arrangement that works until it doesn’t.

I left ALLi thinking about how many authors I know — myself included — who keep adding tactics instead of removing friction. Simplification is harder to sell from a stage than the next shiny thing. But it’s probably the advice most of us actually need right now.

Side note: the honor of the day was Joanna Penn telling me I have a “popcorn brain” like hers— ideas always popping. And yes, I did try to register the domain name before she’d stepped off the stage. To be fair, I do have a lot of ideas. But 2026 is the year of contraction, so I let it go . (For now. Don’t look at me like that.)

The Upload Fee Debate Speaking of James Blatch, he wrote a Substack piece recently that got the comments section so spicy it should’ve come with heartburn meds .

His idea: Amazon KDP should charge $300 per title to upload a book.

The fee would be refundable — basically a reverse advance you’d earn back after hitting $500 in royalties. The goal would be to kill the churn-and-burn model of low-effort AI upload farms flooding the platform with junk.

He’s not wrong that we have a problem.

The three-books-per-day upload limit Amazon quietly introduced was basically an admission that the floodgates were open. A speed bump doesn’t fix a flood.

James raised the question in good faith, and I think it sparked exactly the kind of industry debate we need more of.

But I don’t think $300 is the answer.

Fees to publish aren’t new. BookVault charges them. Ingram used to charge them. Professional organizations like ALLi and IBPA often offer ways to offset costs like that. The concept itself isn’t foreign.

KDP’s entire original value proposition was that you didn’t need permission or upfront capital to publish. A $300 toll booth changes that equation — the number itself may just be too high to avoid unintended consequences. The idea has merit. The execution needs more conversation, which he absolutely said from the jump.

My bigger issue is that this is still treating the symptom.

The flood of low-quality AI content is fundamentally a discoverability problem.

Amazon has the data to solve discoverability. They know sell-through. They know completion. They know returns. They know which books readers start, finish, review, and buy through. They absolutely have the tools to surface books people actually engage with instead of books that just got uploaded in bulk.

They could solve a lot of this without charging authors a dime. Universally, I’d love to have the conversation with all retailers about giving us more access to data. I doubt that’s coming.

That said — I’m not entirely against some kind of friction. Something that makes churn-and-burn uploads less profitable without crushing legitimate authors.

Why I’m Still Optimistic Despite all of this, I still believe a solo author can build a million-dollar career.

I believed it before AI, and I may believe it more now.

Not because AI is magic. But because the operational load that used to require hiring three to five people can increasingly be handled by well-built automations and AI agents.

And I mean actually handled.

This is why I built StorytellerOS .

I kept running into the same problem: I’d open a dashboard and think what the heck am I looking at? Sales from KDP, Draft2Digital, and my direct store in three different places. Social media performance scattered across eleven channels. Newsletter stats in FluentCRM. Book metadata in Airtable. Ad spend in four platforms. None of it talking to each other, all of it requiring me to manually pull numbers together before I could make a single decision. Classic business intelligence problem — and AI is genuinely good at those.

So I built the thing I needed. StorytellerOS has studios for writing, marketing, social media, and sales — and agentic AI running through all of it. It manages exports, drafts newsletters, schedules social, monitors sales data, and pings me when something looks off. A weird drop in page reads, a spike in refunds, an ad campaign bleeding money while I’m not looking — I used to catch that stuff during a ninety-minute Monday morning spreadsheet ritual fueled by an inadvisable amount of caffeine. Now it just happens in the background while I write. Or stare out the window. (At least I’m staring productively, like a character in an Austen novel.)

The authors who figure out how to set up systems like this — whether they build their own, borrow someone else’s, or use something like what I’ve built — are going to have a real operational advantage over the next few years. Because the author who spends four hours a week on admin and the author who spends zero —but still has the data and strategy they need —are going to have very different creative output by December.

The conversation in this industry has moved past should authors use AI . Most people have landed somewhere on that by now. The real question is how do we use it without losing our voice, our judgment, or our ethics?

That’s a much better question.

And yes, I also hold the uncomfortable stuff. The environmental costs are real. AI slop is making discoverability worse. Guardrails matter. Intent matters. You can use these tools thoughtfully and still think critically about their costs.

Where These Conversations Are Actually Happening I’m speaking at Ireland’s Publishing Show this week, and I’m genuinely excited to get into these questions with people who are thinking about them in practical, nuanced ways.

(Also excited to not be on an airplane for five consecutive minutes, but that’s a separate newsletter.)

If you want to go deeper, the AI for Your Author Business Summit is April 21–22, and that’s right around the corner, so at least 11,000 things will change between now and then.

Day 1 is free and packed with practical, implementable takeaways. Whether you’ve never touched an AI tool or you’ve already got workflows duct-taped together in Make.com, you’ll leave with something useful you can put to work the same week.

Day 2 is where we go full nerd: agentic AI, Claude Code, building agents connected to your actual data, and automating the operational grind that keeps you from your desk. I’m bringing examples from authors with real businesses, real revenue, and real readers — not hypothetical “what ifs.”

And if you’re wide — or even just wide-curious — the Wide for the Win community is closing in on 24,000 members, and the conversations happening in there are exactly the ones I think need to happen more: respectful, useful, long-game thinking.

I’ll be back next week with dispatches from Ireland and probably some strong opinions about Irish coffee.

Fair warning.

—Chelle

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I’m in city one of a four-week stretch across four cities and two continents. Publishing popup here, London Book Fair , ALLi Author Lab , Publishing Show in Ireland , then back to the US sometime around the end of March. And this trip I’m doing one European airline rated carry-on and a backpack and staying in places with laundry facilities. Because I absolutely will NOT use a coffee maker to wash my unmentionables . #Gross

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My business will keep running the entire time. Not because I hired a team of ten, but because I spent the last year building systems with clear boundaries — and the boundaries are the part nobody teaches you.

What Actually Happened This Morning I want to show you what this looks like in practice, not the polished “I automated everything and now I sip espresso on a yacht” version, but the real one where I’m dictating newsletter drafts on my iPad in a co-working space with no functioning coffee. (Did I mention the coffee machine? I’m going to keep mentioning the coffee machine.)

One of our writers at Indie Author Magazine emailed to say her author page URL contained her personal email address and she was getting spam because of it. The URL looked like `/author/herauthorgmail-com/` — not great.

My old workflow for something like this:

Read the email and feel mildly guilty about it. Mentally calculate the effort involved (research Ghost’s database structure, SSH into the server, find the MySQL credentials, change the slug, add a redirect so indexed links don’t break, restart the service, reply to the writer). Assign it a priority somewhere between “important but not urgent” and “I’ll get to it when I have a free afternoon.” Punt it. Repeatedly. For weeks, probably months, because there’s always something more urgent. Feel guilty about the punting. Punt the guilt too.

I know this about myself. The task itself might take an hour of focused work, but the mental overhead of context-switching into sysadmin mode — remembering how Ghost’s database works, finding the right credentials, getting my brain into the technical headspace — that’s the real cost. Not the doing. The getting ready to get ready to do the thing.

Instead, AmandaBot handled it. For those of you who haven’t met her, AmandaBot is a semi-autonomous AI agent that lives in Telegram on my phone. I text her like I’d text a human assistant, and she handles things. Not theoretical things. Real things, today, while I’m sitting in a Regus with no functioning coffee. (Last mention, I promise. I’m lying. It won’t be the last mention.)

She saw the email, understood what needed to happen, checked with me, connected to the server, changed the slug in the database, added a permanent redirect from the old URL to the new one, restarted the service, verified everything worked, and emailed the writer back to let her know it was done. If you’ve emailed me in the last few months, there’s a decent chance AmandaBot is the one who replied. She has better response times than I do. (Lower bar than you’d think.)

The whole thing took about two minutes. I didn’t look up a single credential. I didn’t SSH into anything. I didn’t open a terminal.

You might be saying to yourself that this is WAY too technical than you will ever need.

But the same concept applies. You’re in flow state writing, and then you need to stop and look up an ASIN for someone real quick. You get an email from a reader asking where audiobook 3 is, because 4 just dropped. You’ve been putting off figuring out DMARC for your newsletter, or updating your website with new books. Every one of those is a context switch — and every context switch costs you twenty or thirty minutes of momentum you have to rebuild afterward.

Two minutes versus an hour is nice, sure. But the real value is that I never had to leave whatever I was actually working on, load an entirely different set of technical knowledge into my brain, do the thing, and then try to remember where I left off. Multiply those switches across a dozen small tasks per week and you’ve lost most of your productive writing time to stuff that isn’t writing. (And you wonder why the book isn’t done.)

The Part That Actually Matters Here’s what I’ve noticed about the AI conversation in publishing: most of the education focuses on what AI can do. Make images. Write copy. Generate ideas. Chat, copy, paste back to your other window.

And this is where agentic AI — Claude Cowork, Claude Code, Manus, even Notion’s AI features — gets interesting. Instead of bouncing between your chat window and whatever you’re actually working in, these tools operate inside your workflow.

I was talking with a friend yesterday about her processes, and she has a human assistant. I asked her how she delegates things, and it’s remarkably similar to what I do with AmandaBot. She creates a document with instructions (a standard operating procedure), lists the repeated tasks she wants done (skills), and defines the desired outcomes (success metrics). With agentic AI, you do the same thing. Frameworks, expected outcomes, and measurements for success. The setup process is almost identical — the difference is that one of them doesn’t need health insurance. (Sorry, AmandaBot.)

What we’re not talking about enough is how to set up the boundaries. How to give an AI agent enough access to be genuinely useful without giving it enough rope to cause real damage. How to structure your business so that an agent can handle some tasks while being completely locked out of others. How to build trust incrementally, the same way you would with a human.

AmandaBot operates with the same permissions I’d give a competent intern on their first week. They can read emails and respond to straightforward requests. They can make technical changes to websites and systems I own. They can look up financial information — checking whether a payment went through, pulling a report — but they can’t move money, process refunds, or change billing settings. They can’t send emails to my whole list — drafts, yes. Send, no. They can’t publish content without my review. They can’t make promises on my behalf that involve commitments I haven’t approved.

That boundary hasn’t moved, and I don’t plan to move it until I’ve seen enough consistent behavior to trust a wider scope. Same way you’d promote a real employee — gradually, based on demonstrated reliability. (AmandaBot’s annual review is pending. I’ll let her know how it goes.)

If You Want to Learn How to Build This

That’s actually what I’m spending the first two sessions of Day 2 of the AI for Author Business Summit on in April. The first session, “Clone Yourself with Claude Code,” is about the philosophy — what makes a good candidate for delegation versus what you should keep your hands on. How to think about risk and reversibility. The stuff that determines whether your AI assistant actually helps or eventually sends an email you have to apologize for.

The second session, “MCP Servers & Skills: How to Control Your Empire,” is the mechanical how. I’ll show you exactly how I built AmandaBot’s permission system — which tools she can access, which accounts she can read versus write, how I structured the guardrails so they’re specific enough to be meaningful but flexible enough that she can actually get work done. It’s the session I wish someone had taught me before I spent months figuring it out through trial and error. (So many errors. So much trial.)

Day 1 of the summit is completely free, and you’ll walk away with real tools on your machine. Day 2 is the paid upgrade for authors who want the full automation layer. Details and registration at aisummit.indieauthortraining.com .

Get Thee to A Conference James Blatch and Cissy Mecca said something on The Self Publishing Show this week that I want to echo: there is nothing better than in-person conferences.I may be a little biased because I’m here with them, but it’s still true.

The person sitting next to you at lunch who mentions the one tool that solves the problem you’ve been stuck on for six months. The hallway conversation where someone describes their workflow and you realize you’ve been overcomplicating yours by about 400%. The energy of being in a room full of people who take this business as seriously as you do. You can’t automate serendipity. (I’ve tried.)

If you’re on the fence about attending a conference this year, go. Large conferences like Author Nation and SPS Live are amazing for learning new skills and meeting with your business partner vendors. Small conferences with like-minded authors are great for accountability and personal leveling up. Budget for it like you’d budget for ads or a cover designer — treat it like a business expense, not a splurge. And if you’re at London Book Fair or the Publishing Show in Ireland, come find me. I’ll be the one looking for an outlet and pretending to like tea when it’s offered so I don’t start an international incident through sheer rudeness.

What You Can Do This Week Before your next trip — conference, vacation, even a long weekend — write down every task that would pile up while you’re gone. Not the big projects. The small maintenance stuff. The emails that need responses, the social posts that need scheduling, the website updates you keep meaning to make. (You know the ones. They’ve been on your list since October.)

Pick one and automate it before you leave. Just one. Set up a workflow, hand it to an AI tool, schedule it in advance — whatever gets it off your plate. When you get back and that one thing is handled, you’ll understand why I keep talking about this stuff. It’s not about replacing yourself. It’s about freeing up the version of yourself that actually writes books.

I’ll be writing from London next week, from the Regus in Kensington that better have a functioning coffee machine. Decaffeinated Chelle is just not who you want to hear from, promise.

Chelle

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I sat down to write this week’s newsletter and realized I have no fewer than six things to tell you about, which means one of two things: either I’ve been wildly productive or I’ve lost all sense of pacing. (It’s both. It’s always both.)

So here’s what’s in this issue:

Founder and Pro Subscribers now have free access to authorautomations.social (the social scheduler I built for authors, not marketing bros)

We have a Discord now (finally)

There are five new workflows on the Hub

I recorded a full video walkthrough of StorytellerOS so you can actually see the thing I’ve been building instead of just hearing me talk about it, and

I’m announcing the AI for Author Business Summit — which deserves its own section below because I have feelings about it and also logistics

Apparently I’m coming to Boston because you guys voted weird

I considered splitting this into multiple emails. Then I remembered you’re authors. You read 300-page books in a sitting. You can handle a long newsletter.

As the cool YouTubers say, Let’s get into it.

AI for Your Author Business — Free Virtual Summit, April 21–22 This one gets top billing because there’s a countdown clock ticking.

I’m hosting a two-day virtual summit on April 21–22 called AI for Your Author Business , and Day 1 is completely free. Not “free with an asterisk” free. Not “free but we held back the good stuff” free. Actually free, and you’ll leave with working tools on your machine.

Here’s why I’m doing this: I don’t teach writing with AI, unless you count copywriting. The entirety of my business is automating all the stuff that keeps me from doing the creative. This summit focuses on using AI to run your author business — marketing, operations, content creation, email, social scheduling, all of it. The stuff that eats your writing time.

Day 1 (Free — April 21, 10am–3:30pm CDT) is AI Marketing Quick Wins. You’ll walk away with a publishing command center in Airtable (the same template I use daily), marketing copy techniques that actually sound like you wrote them, social graphics and a book trailer you made yourself, and an automated workflow that turns one post into a week of social content. Everything is built live on screen so you can follow along.

Day 2 (Paid Upgrade — April 22, 10am–4pm CDT) is Clone Yourself: The Agentic AI Day. This is where it gets wild. I’ll walk through Claude Code installation and setup live (step by step, no developer background needed), MCP connections that let Claude Code talk to your Gmail, Google Drive, calendar, and Airtable, my actual inbox zero system across six email accounts, newsletter workflows that cut production time to 10 minutes, WordPress management without touching the dashboard, and a full content repurposing pipeline where one newsletter becomes a YouTube video, cross posted on Medium and my own sites, indexed in Google in less than 24 hours, and 26 pieces of social content — posted automatically.

Tickets:

Free — Day 1 access + 30-day replay + StorytellerOS Lite Airtable template

$97 Standard — Both days + 30-day replays + StorytellerOS Lite template

$297 VIP — Both days + 365-day replays + Founder Access to Author Automations (includes weekly calls) + the full StorytellerOS Airtable template with financial tracking, reviews, project management, tasks, and story bible

Register here: https://aisummit.indieauthortraining.com

Day 1 is free and I’m not sandbagging. If you only ever attend the free day, you’ll still leave with more functional tools than most paid workshops deliver. Day 2 is for authors who want the full automation layer — the systems that let AI handle marketing operations so you can get serious hours back in your week.

StorytellerOS — Now You Can Actually See It I’ve been talking about StorytellerOS for months. Describing features, explaining the architecture, generally waving my hands around while saying “trust me, it’s cool.” Which is not exactly a compelling product demo.

So I recorded a full video walkthrough:

The short version for anyone who hasn’t been following along: StorytellerOS is the platform I built because I got tired of running my author business across 47 browser tabs. It started as a tool for me and my writing group (we’ve met almost every day since 2020), and it grew into something bigger.

Project Studio is your publishing command center. All your book files, ASINs, ISBNs, pricing, links, translations, and audiobooks in one place. Enter an ASIN or ISBN and it fetches everything it can. Import Word docs, use the writing studio with goals and time tracking, and manage tasks and finances without switching apps.

Marketing Studio is your customer hub. Email subscribers, lists, newsletters, SMS, WhatsApp, blog posts to WordPress or Shopify, and review management — including automated review requests.

Social Studio is a content calendar, post creation tool, and scheduler for thirteen platforms with full image, carousel, and video creation.

And the part I know some of you are wondering about: StorytellerOS works fully without any AI. Every feature, every tool, no AI required. For those who choose to use it, you bring your own API keys, pick your own model, and your data stays yours. We don’t store it on our servers. The only things in our encrypted database are your Stripe billing details and your encrypted API keys. That’s it.

The video covers all of this in detail. Go watch it, then come tell me what you think in the (brand new) Discord.

Paid Subscribers Now Have Access to authorautomations.social Author Pro and Founder-tier subscribers now have full INCLUDED access to authorautomations.social , the social media scheduling platform I built specifically for authors.

If you missed the original launch last fall: authorautomations.social is a standalone social media scheduler that posts to Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Bluesky from a single dashboard. You log in, connect your accounts, queue up your posts, and walk away.

I built it because I needed a way to post to socials from make.com with a queue instead of hand-scheduling every post on every platform. You want different messages for different platforms because your LinkedIn audience does not care about your character’s dramatic coffee shop confrontation (but your BookTok audience absolutely does).

The part that makes this especially powerful for anyone already using the Hub : authorautomations.social has an API that works with Make.com, Zapier, and n8n. You can wire it directly into your existing workflows. Your RSS feed picks up a new blog post, your workflow formats it for each platform, and authorautomations.social schedules and posts it without you opening a browser. Connect it to your book launch workflow and your cover reveal goes out to eight platforms simultaneously while you’re doing literally anything else.

Paid subscribers get it included with their existing plan. If you’re not a paid subscriber but you want a solid social scheduler without the automation stuff, you can grab authorautomations.social as a standalone product for $39/month at https://authorautomations.social . It does everything Buffer and Hootsuite do, except it was built by someone who actually publishes books for a living.

Or, and I’m not joking, Substack is an absolute weirdo about pricing changes, so I haven’t increased anything here. I’ll let you do the math because I hate math.

Author Automations Now Has a Discord I’ve wanted a real-time chat space for this community for a while. The Hub’s community forum works well for longer discussions and troubleshooting threads, but sometimes you want to ask a quick question, share something you found, or commiserate about why Make.com changed its interface again.

The Author Automations Discord server is live and open to everyone — free subscribers, paid subscribers, mastermind members , and anyone who wandered in from a conference talk. There are channels for automation help, general tech chat, and the kind of random conversations that happen when you put a bunch of nerdy authors in a room together.

Join here: https://discord.gg/rWYYdCSPHk

It’s open, it’s free, and you’re welcome whether you’ve been automating for years or you just learned what Zapier is last Tuesday.

Full disclosure, I’m traveling a LOT in the next month, so you’ll have to talk to one another more than me. Grace is in there to moderate, so please play nice. I’ll be in Savannah for a mastermind, then London for London Book Fair, and the Alliance of Independent Authors Author Lab , then Ireland for the Publishing Show, so say hello if you’re around!

Five New Workflows on the Hub Every workflow from this round is ready to import into your own n8n setup, and they’re on the Hub now with full documentation and tier tags.

1. Daily Podcast Summary & Email Digest This workflow subscribes to any podcast feed and sends you a daily email with AI-generated summaries of new episodes, including key takeaways, timestamps, and action items. If you’re trying to keep up with publishing industry podcasts (or craft podcasts, or marketing podcasts, or that one true crime show you’re embarrassed about), it watches your subscriptions and sends you a morning digest that takes about two minutes to read instead of the 60 it took to record. I’ve been using this for about a dozen feeds and it has genuinely changed how I consume audio content. Instead of a backlog of episodes I feel guilty about, I scan the summaries and only listen to the ones that are actually relevant to what I’m working on.

2. AI Book Keyword & Category Research Finding the right keywords and categories for your book shouldn’t take all weekend. This workflow uses AI to generate seed keywords from your book description, expand them into long-tail variations, and organize everything in a spreadsheet that’s ready for your metadata on Amazon, Draft2Digital, or anywhere you publish. You paste in your blurb, and it hands you back a structured spreadsheet of keyword candidates you can actually use instead of staring at the Amazon category tree until your eyes cross.

3. Reader Feedback Sentiment Analysis This workflow collects reader feedback from a Google Form, runs it through AI sentiment analysis, and logs everything in a color-coded Google Sheet so you can spot trends, fix pain points, and double down on what readers love. The color-coding alone makes this worth installing — you can glance at the sheet and immediately see where things are going well and where something needs your attention without reading every individual response.

4. Automated Thank-You Emails with Personalized Book Recommendations When a reader fills out your feedback form, buys a book, or subscribes to your list, this workflow sends them a personalized thank-you email with book recommendations based on what they’ve already read or purchased. It pulls from your catalog, matches genres and themes, and drafts the email for you. The whole thing runs without you touching it, but you can set it to hold outgoing messages for your review before they send if that makes you more comfortable (I would, at least at first).

5. RSS Feed Monitor — Track Industry News with Images This workflow monitors any RSS feed, grabs new posts with their images, and delivers them to you, which makes it perfect for tracking competitors, industry blogs, podcast feeds, or your own site for broken posts. I use it to monitor about 30 feeds across the publishing industry, and it’s caught a few of my own broken posts before readers noticed (which is exactly the kind of embarrassment prevention I’m willing to automate).

All five are available in the Hub now and they’re all free — no paywalls.

That’s it. That’s the newsletter of a thousand announcements. If you made it this far, you deserve a coffee and possibly a nap. Go register for something and get on Discord.

See you there,

Chelle

I’m not being coy about this — I will literally book a venue based on your answers. So if you’ve been waiting for something closer to home, now’s when you speak up.

What’s a 3-Day Intensive, Anyway? Since I mentioned it, let me explain what you’d actually be voting to bring to your city.

I usually travel to 8-10 countries a year (over-caffeinated, usually on a train), but this year I’m sticking closer to home for the rest of 2026.

I’ve started running small-group intensives wherever I land. You show up with a laptop. I show up with every automation, template, and system I’ve built over the past five years. We spend three days building your version — your dashboard, your social media automation, your AI brand voice, your newsletter pipeline, all of it — and you don’t leave until it’s tested and running.

Eight people max. I build alongside you the entire time. If something breaks, we fix it. If you don’t understand something, I explain it while probably also drinking my fourth espresso. If you want to add something weirdly specific to your workflow. One attendee wanted an agent that watches her Kindle sales rank, cross-references it with her ad spend, and sends her a Slack message that says either “keep going” or “pull the ads” with the math attached. We got it working between espressos on day two.

We figure it out.

I have the last two International Intensives coming up in March and I’d really love to fill the remaining seats with people from this community: London: March 7-9 • 3 spots left — Shannon, Ireland: March 14-16 • 4 spots left

Grab an Intensive Spot

The Year of Support That Comes With It This is the part that makes the pricing kind of absurd. Every intensive seat includes a full year in my Mastermind — Your fractional CTO and operations brain I cap at 40 members. I’ve opened it up until the end of February.

The Mastermind year includes:

Weekly strategy calls (Thursdays, 10 AM Central) where you can bring literally anything — automations, websites, email deliverability, AI tools, why your WooCommerce cart is doing something unhinged at 2 AM. I’ve probably seen it before. I’m your IT Team.

VIP calendar access for 90-minute co-working sessions and private strategy calls. You book time, we work through your stuff together.

Intimate conversations with some of the smartest people in the industry who come hang out with us for an hour. Ads specialists, Book Box geniuses, Intellectual Property Attorneys. These aren’t webinars with 500 people on mute — they’re small-room conversations where you can actually ask your questions and get real answers.

Software licenses worth over $300/month — Late, Placid, Meetn, OnlyPrompts, Storylink, Amelia, Elementor Pro, and FluentBoards. All included for the year. (I negotiated these so my members don’t have to cobble together subscriptions like some kind of digital duct tape situation.)

Every paid webinar I teach — Claude Code for Non-Developers, Airtable for Authors, WordPress with AI, whatever I come up with next. You just show up. Two per month starting in March.

Half off every course I sell on Indie Author Training — Airtable, Notion, Claude Code, FluentCRM (beginning and advanced), AI for Marketing, Productivity and Task Management, Direct Sales for Authors, and more.

All my workflows — the actual Make.com, Zapier, and n8n automations running my business right now. Documented, tested, yours to install.

Direct access to me and my connections . No ticketing system. You text, I answer. Usually within the day, unless I’m on a train somewhere in Europe pretending to be offline (I’m never actually offline).

One price includes the three-day intensive AND all of that for a year. I’ll let you do the math.

All the details are at chellehoniker.com/intensive or chellehoniker.com/mastermind if you don’t want the in-person thing and jump straight to the mastermind. It’s cool either way. And if you want to talk it through before committing, grab time at chellehoniker.com/meet . No pressure, no pitch — just a conversation about whether it’s the right fit.

Now go vote so I know where to book my next flight.

Chelle

That kind of time savings has been incredible for my task list. It’s also left me thinking deeply about the line between knowledge work and creative work—and where AI belongs on either side of that line. I don’t have all the answers. But here’s what sparked my thinking this week.

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Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (the company behind Claude), laid out his predictions in a January 2026 essay called The Adolescence of Technology . He describes what he calls “powerful AI”—essentially a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”—that’s smarter than Nobel Prize winners across most fields, can work autonomously for days or weeks at a time, and could be running in millions of instances within 1–2 years. He’s also publicly predicted that AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in 1–5 years. I buy most of that—not because AI is magical, but because a lot of knowledge work is painfully predictable.

Knowledge Work vs. Creative Work Knowledge work gets graded on correctness. You take inputs, apply rules, and produce a deliverable that can be checked against a standard. Did you follow the process? Is the output accurate? Congrats, here’s your paycheck. It’s work that lives inside a flowchart, and agents love flowcharts. They don’t get bored, they don’t get distracted, and they don’t decide to alphabetize the spice rack halfway through a quarterly report. (We’ve all been there. The spice rack was calling to you. The AI doesn’t hear the spice rack.)

Creative work gets graded on whether a stranger feels something, and there’s no checklist for that. You can hit every craft beat correctly and still produce something that lands with a thud, because resonance isn’t a process you can document. I’ve read plenty of books that did everything “right” and I couldn’t tell you a single character’s name a week later.

AI is extremely good at correctness. Left to its own devices, it’s mediocre at resonance—and that gap is where the real work lives. Some writers are closing that gap brilliantly, using AI as a collaboration partner while infusing every page with their own voice, taste, and weird creative instincts. But if you talk to those writers for five minutes, you’ll hear the same thing: it’s hard . It requires knowing your voice so well that you can spot when AI has smoothed it away. It requires taste sharp enough to reject perfectly competent prose because competent isn’t the same as alive. The writers doing this well aren’t saving effort—they’re redirecting it from drafting into curation, revision, and creative direction, which are skills that take real development.

Without that human layer, AI can write a technically solid book right now. It can do structure. It can do tropes. It can do competent prose that offends no one. It can also crank out 90,000 words that feel like wallpaper. Pretty wallpaper, sure. Still wallpaper.

The difference between AI-assisted books that work and AI-assisted books that don’t isn’t the AI. It’s how much of you ended up on the page. Because readers don’t stick around for wallpaper. They stick around for voice.

Voice is not “good writing.” Voice is taste. It’s what you notice and what you ignore. It’s what you’re willing to say out loud. It’s how your brain moves across the page. It’s the difference between “this is fine” and “I have to text my friend about this character immediately.” AI doesn’t have that. You do. The collaboration works when you bring enough of yours to the table that a reader would never know (or care) how the words got there.

Competent Prose Has the Same Problem as Tribute Bands AI can mimic taste the way a cover band can mimic Depeche Mode. There’s a tribute band called Depeche Tribute that’s genuinely good—they’ve got the sound down, they play the songs right, and I enjoy listening to them. But when I hear them, I don’t feel anything beyond “hey, this is fun.”

When I hear the actual Depeche Mode, it’s a random Friday night and I’m drinking Boone’s Farm Tickle Pink at the Flats in Lake Arrowhead, California with 50 of my best friends, all of us keeping one eye on the keg that someone’s brother that goes to USC got us, and one eye out for cops ready to bust us for underage drinking. I’m not just hearing the music—I’m back in 1985, feeling every dumb, wonderful thing I felt that Sophomore year.

The cover band can’t give me that. They’re playing the notes. They’re not carrying the meaning.

AI-generated fiction—left entirely on its own—has the same problem. It can produce competent prose that hits the right beats and follows the right structures. You might enjoy reading it. But there’s no lived experience underneath it, no accumulation of taste and memory and opinion that makes one author’s voice different from another’s. It’s the notes without the meaning.

I know this newsletter will lose some subscribers because writing with AI is divisive, and some will read this as encouragement. It’s not.

I don’t teach writing with AI. That’s not my lane and I’m not pretending it is. My lane is information, education, marketing automation, and business process optimization, with a sprinkle of with a sprinkle of how to scale without sacrificing sleep, sanity, or the things that made you start writing in the first place.

Educators don’t get to skip the uncomfortable parts just because they’re uncomfortable. I’m not here to tell you what to do with AI and your creative work. I’m here to tell you what I’m seeing, and what I’m seeing is worth talking about honestly.

What I’m seeing is this: some writers are using AI as a collaboration partner and producing work that resonates. They’re bringing their own Boone’s Farm moments to the process—their memories, their opinions, their willingness to cut a perfectly good sentence because it doesn’t sound like them—and using AI to get to a draft faster so they can do the real work of making it theirs. That’s a legitimate creative process. It’s also genuinely difficult, because it means knowing your voice well enough to hear when it’s missing.

So no, I’m not losing sleep over AI replacing novelists. I’m losing sleep over authors burning their best creative energy on admin that machines are about to bulldoze. I’m losing sleep over the stuff that’s actually fixable.

Use Agents for the Business Work. Let Them Earn Their Keep. Give AI the stuff you already resent doing: inbox sorting and triage, drafting and scheduling your newsletter, writing and reformatting book descriptions for twelve different retailers, updating backmatter links across your entire catalog every time you release a new book, generating keywords and categories for a launch, building a series page on your website, pulling your sales data into a spreadsheet that actually makes sense, turning one blog post into a thread, a carousel, a short-form video script, and a pin. Formatting and metadata and distribution. The stuff that keeps you at your desk at 11pm even though the actual book is done.

If an assistant could do it, an agent will do it. Probably faster. Definitely without asking you where the Google Drive folder is.

Then keep the story decisions with the human who has a point of view. Keep the parts that make readers care: what the book is actually about under the plot, what your characters want and what you refuse to give them, what you find funny or sharp or tender or unforgivable, the emotional experience you’re building on purpose, the choices that make your work feel like you and not like “a book in this genre.”

A lot of books are going to get replaced by AI-generated content, because they’re text, not storytelling. AI Agents will eat that market like it’s free snacks. But this isn’t new. Kris Austin, CEO of Draft2Digital, told me his company was fighting off literally thousands of smoothie recipe books a decade ago —people chasing quick money with low-quality content designed to ride whatever trend was hot. Before that it was keto books. Before that it was crypto guides. The opportunists have always been here. AI just made their playbook faster and cheaper.

The scale tells you everything. Draft2Digital now rejects between 40 and 75 percent of all book submissions, and it’s almost entirely AI-generated nonfiction. Thousands arrive every single day. The fiction side is a different story: Austin says authors who’ve tried to write full novels with AI “tend not to do very well in the market. That humanity seems to be missing. It’s kind of one of those things you can’t directly define, but it doesn’t appear that readers are connecting with that content.”

That tracks with everything we’ve been talking about. The notes without the meaning. The cover band without the Friday night memory. Readers notice, even when they can’t articulate exactly what’s off—and Austin predicts they’ll feel betrayed when they find out a book sold as human-authored wasn’t.

Authors who write with opinion, specificity, and a little nerve are going to be fine. Not because AI can’t write. Because AI can’t be you.

So yeah, let the AI agents have the checklists. Writers still get to be weird. And thank all the deities, because the world does not need one more perfectly acceptable book.

What I’m Focused on in 2026 Last weekend I had a website update to handle—SEO cleanup and some structural changes so AI tools could actually find and surface the content correctly (LLM optimization is a whole thing now, and I’ll talk about that next week). My muscle memory said open Make.com. Instead, I opened Claude Code to see if it could handle it.

Spoiler: It did. And then some. Read how:

My own workflow had shifted underneath me without me making some big strategic decision about it. I’ve been reassessing my automations all year, and I keep reaching for agentic AI first—website updates, SEO optimization, content structuring—and reaching for my traditional automation tools second. Make.com, n8n, and Zapier aren’t going anywhere (they’re still the backbone for repeatable, scheduled workflows), but I’m handing the one-shot, messy, or judgment-heavy stuff to agents now.

I’ve also been leaning into two content directions this year outside this newsletter to get some more perspective and options that shape it, and also provide better examples of technical stuff:

CEO interviews — We launched a new series on YouTube/@indieauthormagazine where I sit down with the people running the companies authors depend on. Less “how to use the tool,” more “what’s the vision and why should authors care.” (The Kris Austin interview above came from this series.)

Technical walkthroughs — My channel at YouTube/@chellehoniker is where I break down the actual builds, with deeper automation tutorials living on hub.authorautomations.com .

And one more thing: Indie Author Magazine is now on Substack. If you want industry news, craft deep-dives, and interviews with authors who are doing interesting things, subscribe at indieauthormagazine.substack.com . It’s a different newsletter than this one—less automation nerdery, more publishing strategy and author business. If you’re already subscribed here, you might want both.

What to Do This Week (If You’re Curious About What AI Can Actually Do) Build an “admin vacuum” for your inbox. Create one rule or filter that catches newsletters, receipts, and platform notifications and sends them to a folder you check once a day. Your brain is not a dumpster. Stop living like it is. (I’ve got a full walkthrough on inbox triage at hub.authorautomations.com —look for the email management workflows.)

Pick one thing from the suck list and hand it to AI this week. Not all of them. One. Maybe it’s reformatting your book description for a new retailer. Maybe it’s pulling your January sales data into a spreadsheet. Maybe it’s updating the website you’ve been ignoring since your last release. Pick the task that’s been sitting on your to-do list making you feel guilty, and let an AI tool take the first pass. You’ll edit the output—that’s fine. You’re not starting from zero anymore.

Create a repurposing pipeline for one piece of content. One newsletter becomes a short post, a longer post, a carousel, and a pin. You edit for voice, but you stop writing five separate things from scratch every week. (The Hub has a content repurposing workflow that does exactly this—connect it to your publishing platform and let it run.)

None of this requires you to have an opinion about AI and writing. This is just getting the business busywork off your plate so you have more time for the work you actually care about—whatever that looks like for you.

If you want help, hit reply and tell me what you’re drowning in right now: inbox, content, research, launches, or customer support. I’ll point you at the simplest automation that gets your time back without turning you into a part-time systems engineer.

—Chelle

Upcoming Free Webinars All webinars are free and replays are available if you can’t make it live. See the full schedule and register here.

February 10 @ 10am CST — What’s All the Fuss About Claude Code Chelle Honiker (That’s me. I’ll be showing what I’ve been ranting about in this newsletter.)

February 11 @ 11am CST — It’s Not the Price—It’s the Perception: Make Higher Prices a No-Brainer Celeste Barclay

February 18 @ 11am CST — Edit Smarter, Not Harder: How AI Can Reveal What Your Story Is Really Doing Alessandra Torre & JD Lasica

March 4 @ 11am CST — Design a Writing Career That Fits Marla Albertie

March 11 @ 11am CDT — Are You Blocking Your Success? Aryn Van Dyke

April 8 @ 11am CDT — Print Matters: Learn How to Leverage Print to Grow Sales Dave Sheets

April 15 @ 11am CDT — Email Marketing That Turns Readers into Fans (and Buyers) Dale Roberts

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re overwhelmed and want to start smaller, the regular Author Automations newsletter is and judges no one. Go to https://authorautomations.com/account and switch off the Advanced Automations notifications and you’ll be all set.

You Went Outside This Weekend. I Talked to Robots Having said that, I did actually complete three to four months of work in one weekend. I kept a running list, and by Sunday night I was genuinely struggling to remember everything because it got so long. At some point I stopped counting and started just pointing Claude Code at problems like a fire hose.

Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Funny story: my daughter and her family went on a walk and two blocks later, they were at my house with her husband and Princess Elowyn and Prince Kieran. I was in the middle of using Wispr Flow to dictate instructions, and she asked, “Are you yelling at your AI?” I had to reply yes, but I’m usually nice so when they rise up I’ll be spared.

Anyway. Here’s what got done while I was yelling politely at robots.

The Great Image Migration I had 32,000 images sitting on an old WordPress server, doing nothing useful except costing me money and whispering “remember me?” every time I logged in. Claude Code moved them to a Photoprism asset manager, labeled them, and made them searchable for the IAM team via ChelleBot. The kind of project that lives on your to-do list for years because you can’t stomach the tedium finally got done while I drank my coffee and pretended I was being productive by watching progress bars.

The Ghost Website Audit I pointed Claude Code at our Ghost website and asked for a full audit. It found 72 broken images—the slow-drip problem that erodes reader trust and tanks SEO without ever sending you a calendar invite to let you know it’s happening. Claude Code fixed them automatically, flagged the outliers it couldn’t handle, and drafted a complete email to Grace with specific instructions for the manual fixes. I reviewed it, hit send, and felt like a manager for approximately thirty seconds before moving on to the next thing.

Plugin Updates Across 60+ Sites I own or host more than 60 WordPress sites. (This is what happens when you say “yes” for fifteen years straight.) Each one sends me tagged emails when plugins need updating—emails I had been aggressively ignoring because logging into 60 dashboards sounds like a punishment, not a task. Claude Code reads those emails now, and it updated the plugins as needed. I didn’t log into a single dashboard. Not one.

Cloudflare DNS Housekeeping I connected Claude Code to Cloudflare and had it audit every domain name record I own. Misconfigurations, outdated entries, the digital equivalent of junk drawers that accumulate when you’re moving fast and telling yourself you’ll fix it later—all cleaned up in one pass. Past Chelle left a mess. Present Chelle had a robot clean it up. Future Chelle is thrilled.

AWS Cost Cleanup My Amazon AWS account had storage buckets quietly racking up costs with dead files from 2022. Files I forgot existed from projects that ended years ago, just sitting there collecting dust and charging me for the privilege. Claude Code found them and cleared them out, which means my next AWS bill won’t make me mutter curse words under my breath.

A Full Wix-to-WordPress Migration I migrated an entire website from Wix to WordPress—new design, fully responsive, all the original images moved over. Then I had Claude Code audit the book schemas, check every link, add alt text to images, and verify SEO was solid. One website, completely rebuilt and properly optimized, done in less time than it takes me to decide what to watch on Netflix.

A New Support Portal I created a dedicated support site at support.indieauthormagazine.com and migrated all our old tickets to the new system. We had a batch of tickets from a technical issue that needed a backend fix. Claude Code fixed the underlying technical problem, then drafted replies to let customers know the issue was resolved, and closed the tickets. The robot fixed the thing AND told people it fixed the thing. I just reviewed and approved.

StorytellerOS Bug Fixes in Real Time I’ve been using Claude Code to debug and build StorytellerOS.com, and this weekend we cleared the beta user tickets. Here’s where it gets slightly absurd: a user submitted a bug. Claude Code was monitoring my email, identified the issue, fixed it, and sent a notification to the user. Because it’s connected to the server and monitoring logs, it pinged me on Telegram when the user tried the fix and confirmed it worked. I found out a bug was fixed because I got a message saying the user was happy. I was eating lunch. The bug was already handled. I have questions about what my job even is anymore.

Course Migration I had two courses sitting in LearnDash on an old site, collecting digital cobwebs. Claude Code migrated them to FluentCommunities on IndieAuthorTraining.com—created the courses, built the lessons, moved the videos. The courses that have been on my “I should really move those” list since 2023 are now moved.

The Real Math I’m sure I’m forgetting things. The weekend blurred together into a stream of “okay, now do this” followed by watching progress bars and reviewing results and occasionally saying “wait, it’s done already?” out loud to no one.

This isn’t about replacing the work. It’s about finally doing the work—the unglamorous, never-urgent, always-important maintenance that keeps a business running smoothly. The stuff that sits on the list for months (or years, no judgment) because there’s always something more pressing, more interesting, or more likely to generate immediate dopamine.

That stuff is done now. And I have feelings about it.

What’s All the Fuss About Claude Code?

You’ve heard people losing their minds over Claude. Maybe you’ve even chatted with it yourself. But now there’s Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and regular Claude Chat — and nobody’s explaining which one actually matters for authors.

Here’s the short version: Claude Chat is the conversation you’re probably already having. Cowork is Anthropic’s attempt at letting Claude touch your files (it’s… fine). Claude Code is the one that just ate four months of my task list in a single weekend.

In this webinar, I’ll break down what each tool actually does, when you’d reach for one over another, and why Code has me rethinking what’s possible for solo operators who don’t have a tech team. We’ll talk real author use cases — not developer hype — and I’ll show you what happened when I pointed Claude Code at my actual backlog and let it run.

Fair warning: I’m going to be honest about the limitations too. These tools aren’t magic, and Cowork in particular has some “bless its heart” moments. But Code? Code is different.

If you’ve been Claude-curious but confused about which flavor to care about, this is the hour that’ll sort it out.

Register here: https://webinars.indieauthortraining.com/talks/whats-all-the-fuss-about-claude-code

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