I’m writing this from a corporate apartment in Savannah that I booked because it’s in the same building as a Regus co-working space. I have a Regus subscription now — ten days a month in a private office in any country — and over the past two years, I’ve been rating their locations the way some people collect stamps. Helsinki and Copenhagen are lovely. San Antonio is great. Savannah’s coffee machine is broken. Zero stars.
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
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