This is Author Automations: Advanced, where I share the messy, technical reality of running multiple businesses while building software and occasionally remembering I also write books.

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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.

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

Over the summer, my inbox went completely feral—full-on, cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs out of control. By the time I rolled back into my office chair, more than 800 of them were waiting for me. And not the harmless kind you can breeze through with a quick skim and archive, either. These were the messy, high-maintenance, “Chelle, you actually have to do something about this” emails—Calls, support requests, and a steady stream of project updates kept pouring in—each one needing me to actually do something before I could reply.

And instead of firing off a quick “got it, I’ll get back to you,” I let them sit. They piled up like unopened mail on the kitchen counter, a horrible habit that only made things worse.

Did I immediately sit down and power through them like a responsible adult? Absolutely not. I opened Gmail, took one look, and decided that triaging a handful here and there was “good enough.” Spoiler: it wasn’t. Every day I chipped away at the pile, and every day it grew taller, louder, and more impossible to ignore.

Eventually I hit the wall. I couldn’t out-organize or out-willpower my way through 800+ action items, and I was tired of the inbox dictating my schedule. So I did what I always do when the chaos wins—I built an automation. This time it wasn’t about saving a few clicks. It was about survival.

N8N Has Entered the Chat

Now, I’ve tried a lot of automation tools, and most of them can shuffle emails around just fine. But here’s where I kept hitting the wall: Make.com, which I still use every day for plenty of other things, falls apart the moment Gmail threads are involved. Instead of pulling the full conversation, it only grabs the last reply. And in my inbox, nine times out of ten that “reply” is nothing more than a polite throwaway—“thanks” or “got it”—with none of the context that came before. When I’m staring down hundreds of emails that all require action, context isn’t optional. It’s the only way I can tell if I’m supposed to confirm a meeting, update a project, or just acknowledge a support request.

And it doesn’t stop there. When I wanted to go a step further and have my automation draft or send a reply, Make.com completely tripped over its own feet. Out of the box, it just couldn’t do it. To make it work, I had to bolt on six extra steps, wire up a bunch of conditions and filters, and even drop in actual Python code. At that point it didn’t feel like no-code automation anymore—it felt like punishment for asking my tools to be useful.

So I switched gears and built the workflow in n8n instead. It runs on a schedule—midnight, 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, and 7pm—so my inbox gets cleaned out several times a day without me lifting a finger. First it pulls in all my unread emails, then it checks a few variables to make sure the message is actually waiting on me to take action. From there, it pushes each email through a classification step that sorts them into buckets.

And these buckets aren’t just the usual “receipts” or “spam” kind of folders. I’ve trained the system to recognize the specific areas of my business: Author Nation, Indie Author Magazine, Indie Author Training, Direct2Readers, and Author Automations. On top of that, I’ve got buckets for support requests, social notifications, meeting assets, fraud or security alerts, and yes, the occasional sales pitch.

Here’s the clever bit: when an email lands in one of those business buckets, the workflow checks against a shared Google Doc that I keep updated with core information. For example, there’s one doc for Author Nation, one for Indie Author Training, one for Direct2Readers, and so on. That means the system already “knows” the basic answers, policies, or links for each project. My team and I can add to those docs anytime, so they become a living knowledge base without me needing to build a giant database.

Once the classification step is done, the workflow drafts a reply in Gmail using that context. All I have to do is review the drafts, make quick tweaks if needed, and hit send. The rest gets labeled and archived automatically. Instead of wading through a swamp of messages, I’m left with just the ones that genuinely require my attention.

The magic here isn’t that it sorts emails into neat little piles. Plenty of tools can do that. What makes this workflow powerful is the combination of context and control.

First, n8n grabs the entire Gmail thread, not just the last reply. The workflow sees the whole conversation and classifies it based on the actual content, not a throwaway “thanks.”

Second, the Google Docs integration means my replies have accurate, up-to-date information and sound like me because they’re pulling from information I’ve already written. I want it to pull the right policy, the right link, or the right tone from the Google docs we can update as needed.

And third, the human review step matters. I don’t want to hand over my inbox completely. The workflow takes care of the heavy lifting—sorting, labeling, drafting—but I still get the final say. All I have to do is buzz through the drafts, tweak a word here or there, and hit send. Ten minutes later, I’ve cleared what used to take me an entire afternoon.

This is the sweet spot of automation for me. It’s not about replacing myself—it’s about giving myself a head start.

The video in this week’s issue is a walkthrough of the automation in action. You can see what I start and end with. This is just for my personal inbox. I’ve cloned this automation for the other 8 boxes I manage to do the same thing.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you get the keys to this kingdom. I’ve bundled up the full n8n workflow so you can import it straight into your own setup. No reinventing the wheel, no trying to squint at screenshots and rebuild it from scratch—you’ll have the actual file I use every day to keep my inbox under control.

And because I know the magic isn’t in the file, it’s in the setup, I’m also hosting a live done-with-you webinar on September 30th at 12N Central. We’ll walk through the entire thing together, step by step, and you’ll have the chance to get your questions answered in real time. By the end of that session, you won’t just understand how the workflow works—you’ll have your own version up and running.

This is the kind of system that pays for itself the first time you don’t spend three hours stuck in Gmail.

If you’re a free subscriber, you can join this webinar, too! You can register for $39 here, or upgrade your newsletter subscription and I’ll send you the coupon code.

Here’s the companion walkthrough—with every step I took, so you can follow along or refer back later.

🔧 What You’ll Need Up Front

• An Amazon AWS account

• A domain or subdomain (optional, but recommended)

• 10 minutes of focused attention (okay, maybe 12)

🪜 Step-by-Step: Spinning Up Self-Hosted n8n

1. Create an AWS Lightsail Instance

• Log in to your AWS account.

• Head to Amazon Lightsail.

• Choose Ubuntu 22.04 (not 24.04).

• Pick the $12/month plan (you get 90 days free). Don’t go lower—cheaper tiers are painfully slow.

• Click Create Instance and let it spin up.

2. (Optional but Smart): Attach a Static IP

• In Lightsail → Networking tab, assign a static IP to your instance.

• This prevents things from breaking if your IP changes.

3. Install EasyPanel on the Instance

• Click Connect using SSH inside Lightsail.

• Once the terminal loads, enter:

• sudo -i

• Go to EasyPanel.io, copy the install command from their site, and paste it into the terminal.

• This installs Docker and EasyPanel for you—no manual config needed.

4. Open Required Ports

In the Lightsail firewall settings:

• Add port 3000 (for EasyPanel access).

• Add port 8080 (optional, but helpful for some services).

• You should now have ports: 22, 80, 3000, and optionally 8080 open.

5. Set Up EasyPanel

• Once installed, visit:

http://your-server-ip:3000

• Create your admin account (email + password).

• Login and you’ll land on the EasyPanel dashboard.

🚀 Install n8n via EasyPanel

6. Create a New Project

• In EasyPanel, click New Project → name it something like n8n2.

• Inside the project, go to Services → choose n8n from the available templates.

• Click Create Service.

EasyPanel handles everything for you—just click to deploy.

🎯 Final Touches

• Once deployed, you’ll see a green "Running" light.

• Click Open and n8n will launch in your browser.

• The first time you visit, you’ll set up your n8n account.

• Skip the license for now—free is fine.

You now have:

• A fully running local instance of n8n

• Secure credentials

• Full access to your workflows, templates, executions, and settings

TL;DR:
This setup gives you a local, private, and scalable n8n environment that plays nicely with your other self-hosted tools—and saves you from the SaaS hamster wheel.