VEGAS OR BUST. My flight was cancelled due to mechanical issues, so I’m home for one extra night and I’ll fly out at 5am tomorrow. If you’re at Author Nation this week, please stop by the Indie Author Magazine booth Monday - Thursday, or the Direct2Readers.com booth on Friday! I’m also speaking Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and would love to see you!
In our weekly founder group call last week, we were refining a Make.com automation that we customized at a recent intensive event. In the Hub, it’s the “social media step one” (free to download) She’d create a Google Doc with some chapter content, the workflow would fire, and out would come social media posts with images and captions.
But honestly? The longer I’ve used and taught this automation, the more I realized that what was being produced wasn’t ELEGANT. It was clunky. The images were just fine. The captions sounded like every other author on the internet. The voice was... off.
The automation was doing its job. But it hit me like a Mack truck. It wasn’t ON BRAND. Everyone had pieces of their brand scattered everywhere. Some folks had full brand guides. Some had color palettes and hex codes saved in a Google Doc somewhere. A few had social media strategies.
But nobody had it all in one place, and more importantly, nobody had it in a format that LLMs could actually USE to produce content that sounded like THEM.
My thought was that we needed two things. One, was something to create the cohesive brand, copywriting, and social media documentation the LLM actually needed to go from good to great. And two, we needed a social media step .5 (a prequel, if you will) to populate Airtable with the ON BRAND and specific ideas before the social posts are created.
You will be shocked to learn I built them.
This week we’ll walk through the first tool, and next week I’ll walk you through the make.com workflow that creates 30 days of content ideas so you don’t have to guess.
How do you TEACH AI to sound like you?
That’s the question that matters, and the answer is frameworks.
Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: AI doesn’t suck at writing. AI sucks at writing without instructions.
You know what happens when you tell AI “write me a social media post about my new book”? You get: “🎉 Exciting news, readers! I’m thrilled to announce that my latest novel is now available! Grab your copy today and dive into this incredible journey! 📚✨”
Nobody talks like that. Nobody real, anyway. And readers certainly don’t respond to that.
But here’s what everyone misses: this isn’t AI’s fault. You gave it nothing to work with. You said “write like me” but you never defined what “like me” actually means.
Do you use exclamation points in every sentence or save them for actual excitement? Do you open newsletters with personal anecdotes or get straight to the point? Do you say “y’all” or would that feel like wearing someone else’s clothes? Is your vibe “warm and chatty” or “direct and sassy”?
Frameworks Are Structure, and All Tools Love Structure
This is what I realized watching that workflow come together: the difference between automation that creates generic slop and automation that creates YOUR content isn’t better AI. It’s better INSTRUCTIONS.
AI, automation tools, assistants, designers—they’re all desperately waiting for you to tell them the rules. They WANT guardrails. They THRIVE on specificity.
But “sound like me” isn’t specific. “Write engaging content” isn’t structure. “Make it on-brand” means nothing if you haven’t defined your brand.
You need frameworks. Three of them, actually.
The Three Framework Documents That Change Everything
1. Brand Guide – The guardrails for your pen name.
Not “my brand is fun and approachable.” That’s useless. I mean:
What EXACT genre? (Cozy Paranormal Mystery, not just “mystery”)
What’s your tone? (Warm and chatty with a dash of whimsy. Like chatting with your funny aunt who believes in ghosts and always has cookies.)
Who are your ACTUAL readers? (Women 45-65 who love cozy mysteries with supernatural elements, hate gore, and read 2-3 books/week—not “anyone who likes mysteries”)
What’s your tagline? (”Where ghosts are more trouble than they’re worth”)
What’s your color palette WITH HEX CODES? (Soft Lavender
#E6E6FA, Warm Cream#FFFDD0, Dusty Rose#DCAE96)What visual references inspire this pen name’s brand? (Beatrix Potter illustrations meet vintage Halloween postcards. Think cottagecore with a supernatural twist.)
See the difference?
2. Copywriting Style Guide – How YOU write.
This is where it gets good, because this isn’t about whether you’re a “good writer.” This is about defining your patterns so tools can replicate them.
Things like:
What POV do you use? First person in newsletters (”I’m excited to announce”), third person in press releases (”Author Jane Smith announces”)?
How formal are you on a scale of 1-5? (And what does a 2 actually SOUND like in your newsletters vs. your blog posts?)
Write an ACTUAL sample email reply to a reader who loved your book. Not “I’m friendly and responsive.” Show me the email.
What words do you naturally use? (Y’all, totally, here’s the thing, I’m obsessed with, let’s be real)
What words do you avoid? (Utilize, leverage, synergy, corporate buzzwords that make your skin crawl)
What are your punctuation quirks? (Love em dashes—they’re perfect for asides. Embrace exclamation points in newsletters! More reserved in formal announcements.)
You know what AI does when you feed it that level of detail? It nails your voice, because now it has a rubric to follow.
3. Social Media Guide – The specifics.
This is where you decide upfront how you’re going to show up online. Not just “I post on Instagram and Facebook,” but the real questions:
Which platforms and WHY? (Instagram has a huge cozy mystery community with #bookstagram. Facebook has active reader groups for my age demographic.)
What are your content pillars? (The 3-5 core themes you consistently post about: Behind-the-scenes writing process, Book recommendations in your genre, Reader community engagement)
How hands-on are you? Do you speak in first person (”I’m releasing a book Thursday”) or third person (”Lola MacDougall releases her new book Thursday”)?
Emoji strategy? (Moderate use—mainly cozy/bookish emojis: 📚☕👻🏚️🔍)
What’s OFF LIMITS? (Politics, personal family drama, your other pen names, religion, sensitive subjects)
When your social media planner knows these boundaries and preferences, it stops posting like a bot and starts posting like YOU.
I Built an App for This (Because I’m Extra and Do the Most)
You can find it at https://brandguide.authorautomations.com
The app walks you through 35 questions total—13 for brand (about 15 minutes), 14 for copywriting, 8 for social—to build all three frameworks. The whole thing takes about 30 minutes if you’re focused.
These aren’t fluffy questions. These are the “write an actual sample newsletter opening in your natural voice” kind of questions. The “describe your sentence and paragraph style—do you use fragments for emphasis or avoid them?” kind of questions.
Each question builds on the previous ones. It remembers your genre when asking about color palettes. It knows your tone when suggesting how you handle humor. There’s AI brainstorming built in for every single question if you get stuck, and you can give the AI guidance to get even more specific results.
For example, when you’re working on “What makes you unique,” the AI prompt doesn’t just ask Claude to “make something up.” It says:
“For [your pen name], a [your genre] author targeting [your audience], generate 5 SPECIFIC differentiation examples that set this pen name apart from competitors. Focus on concrete details readers can ONLY get from this author. Be specific and vivid—avoid generic statements.”
And if the suggestions aren’t quite right? You can add guidance like “cozy paranormal fantasy set on a tropical island off the coast of Texas” and regenerate. The AI will take that guidance and give you better options.
Generic questions produce generic frameworks. Generic frameworks produce generic content. I wasn’t interested in building another “tell me about your brand” questionnaire that spits out platitudes.
What Happens When You Have These Frameworks?
You download them as simple text files. Then you upload them everywhere you work with AI.
My key use for them: Add them as a reference doc in make.com and n8n. Call them when you need them. Update them as things change or you need refinements.
Want to use them in Typing Mind? Create an agent (I call them personas) and upload all three files as training data. Now when you’re brainstorming social media content, it knows your voice, your brand colors, your emoji policy, everything.
Want to use them in Claude? Open a Claude Project and add them as project knowledge. Every conversation in that project now has full context about your brand.
Want to use them in ChatGPT? Upload them to a custom GPT. Configure it once, use it forever.
Don’t have any of those? Copy and paste the frameworks into a regular chat window. The LLM will read them and understand who you are. They’re small txt documents, so they don’t eat up your context window.
Suddenly your automations produce social posts that sound like you, not like ChatGPT’s fever dream of what an author should sound like. Your assistant stops writing emails that make you say “I would NEVER phrase it like that” before rewriting the whole thing yourself. Your designer creates graphics that match your vibe on the first try instead of the seventh revision.
But here’s what nobody talks about: just going through the exercise of answering these questions gives you clarity.
You’ll realize you’ve been inconsistent about your POV—first person in newsletters but randomly switching to third person in blog posts for no reason.
You’ll catch yourself using your thriller voice in your cozy mystery newsletters because you never actually DEFINED the difference.
You’ll finally articulate what makes you different instead of vaguely gesturing at “my books are unique” without explaining HOW.
The frameworks are the output. The clarity is the bonus. The better content is the payoff.
The Brand Guide Is Completely Free
No credit card. No trial that expires. No “just $47/month after your 7-day preview.” You don’t even need to enter an email address to use it, though if you want to save your progress and come back later, you can. We use magic links, so no passwords to remember or reset.
I’m not collecting emails for marketing. I’m not building a list. The only thing stored on the server is your progress tied to your email if you choose to save it. That’s it.
You can save your responses, review them later, export them, and create frameworks for multiple pen names. Each pen name needs its own frameworks because your cozy mystery brand is NOT your spicy romance brand. Your non-fiction voice is NOT your fiction voice.
Go build yours:
https://brandguide.authorautomations.com
And Then What?
Once you have your frameworks, you plug them into the workflow I’m demonstrating at Author Nation. The one that takes you from “I need social media content” to “here are 30 pieces of on-brand content with images, captions, and a posting schedule” in about 10 minutes.
Here’s a complete walkthrough:
In the next video (after Author Nation!) I’m walking through the actual Make.com workflow that uses these frameworks to generate that content. We’re talking Airtable integration, automated image creation, the whole nine yards.
Have an amazing week and let me know if you have any feedback on the tool! I vibe-coded it with Claude Code - first as an artifact, but then as a full app, so there may be bugs, but thats’s Claude’s fault and not mine, obvs.
Until next time,
Chelle