Actual representation of all the things I have to tell you this week.
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