Exactly six years ago, I was sitting in a B&B in Northern Ireland trying to figure out how to get back to the States. The world had other plans, and I decided it was safer to stay put. I stayed for four months. During that weird, suspended stretch of time, a group of author friends came together to write, share meals, and share lives.
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
Author Automations is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.