I Built the Thing That Replaced My Own Workflow

On agentic AI, a Claude plugin that creates and posts your TikTok videos, and why this newsletter can't stay the same

I’m writing this from Canterbury, which is where I usually post up after a string of conferences on this side of the Atlantic. (After Author Nation it’s my mom’s place in Lake Tahoe. After Europe it’s Canterbury. I have decompression spots the way some people have lucky socks.) This is where I process what I’ve learned, synthesize it, and figure out what it means for the work I’m doing.

I have a lot to process this time. And some of it changes this newsletter.

Ireland Was AI-Positive in a Way I Haven’t Seen Before

At Ireland’s Publishing Show, several sessions — including mine — were explicitly labeled as AI sessions. Which meant the room was self-selected: people who showed up had moved past “should we” a long time ago and were ready to get into the how. We skipped the throat-clearing and went straight to the good stuff, which was honestly a relief after years of opening every talk with kindergarten rules: no biting, no hitting, no crying, and eyes on your own paper.

One speaker, Matthias Kadott, did something I loved: he created a brand new pen name specifically as a proof of concept for the conference. Started from scratch, wrote a book, deployed it to market including AI translations — and netted over €7,000 in a single month. As a demo. With receipts.

I don’t know about you, but I looked at that number and thought: okay, the landscape has genuinely shifted. The tools are here. The playbook is different. And people are already running it.

I Radically Changed My Own Presentation

I was originally planning to teach my usual Make.com and Zapier workflows for managing social media. That’s been my bread and butter for two years. It’s what this newsletter was built on.

I scrapped it (with permission) and taught social media using agentic AI instead.

It felt a little strange, honestly. Like showing up to Thanksgiving with a completely different casserole and hoping nobody asks what happened to the old one. But I couldn’t in good conscience stand in front of a room and teach a three-step Make.com scenario when I know there’s a faster, more powerful way to do the same thing — and when I’ve already built it.

I still have Make.com and Zapier workflows running in my business. They’re solid for scheduled data transfers and on-demand tasks. I’m not throwing them away. But when I’m reaching for a tool now, my first choice is agentic AI and vibe-coded apps. That shift happened gradually over the last year and then very quickly over the last few months.

The Thing I Built That Replaced the Workflow

Okay, here’s the concrete version.

I used to have a three-step Make.com workflow that required Airtable as a data source to create social media content from my books. It did the job. I taught it at conferences and in the Hub. People built their own versions of it.

I replaced it with authorautomations.social.

It creates 30 days of content in minutes — TikTok videos, carousels, captions — from your own books. Posts to 13 social media channels in your voice, with your content. The whole Airtable-to-Make pipeline that used to power this is gone. You don’t need it anymore.

It’s free for Founder subscribers and $29/month for everyone else.

And here’s the part that still makes me grin every time I demo it: there’s a Claude plugin for it. Which means you can sit in Claude and say, “Create 20 TikToks and post them to TikTok over the next week to promote Book 1 before Book 2 launches.” Claude reads the context on your own machine, generates the content, and uses authorautomations.social to schedule and post it.

You describe what you need in plain English. It happens. While you go write. Or nap. Or finally text back the friend you've been "meaning to reply to" since November. (Just me?)

This Newsletter Is Changing

I’ve been wrestling with this for a while, and Ireland made it click.

Agentic AI is the single greatest opportunity for indie authors to build million-dollar creative careers. It can manage the entire operational side of your publishing business — marketing, social, newsletters, sales tracking, metadata, all of it — while you write. “Bots do the boring so you can do the brilliant” was always the tagline. It’s just that now the bots are significantly less boring and significantly more capable.

I’m not pivoting into writing-with-AI territory. There are stronger voices in that space and I’m happy to point you toward them. But Author Automations is now where you come to learn how to run your author business using agentic AI.

The name probably needs to change at some point. But 2026 is the year of contraction and I am exercising restraint for possibly the first time in my life. (Joanna Penn did just tell me I have a “popcorn brain,” so the restraint is relative.)

What Stays

The Hub isn’t going anywhere. Plugins, extensions, templates — all still there, all still accessible. I’ll still post workflows for Make.com, N8N, and Zapier when they’re the right tool for the job. There will just be fewer of them, because most of the time I’m reaching for something else now.

What’s Coming

A lot of webinars, and virtual live events. I’ll be back in Austin next week where the bandwidth is much better, and my espresso machine is about to get a workout. I’ll post a full calendar when I’m back, but for now you can plan on:

What’s all the fuss about Claude Code & CoWork? Claude Code and Cowork keep coming up and nobody's explaining them well. I'm going to fix that — with a walkthrough built for authors, not developers (I recorded this a few weeks ago but things have changed and I want to update it with the new cool stuff)

authorautomations.social Deep Dive + the Claude Plugin — A full walkthrough of the app, including the Claude plugin that lets you manage your social media with natural language commands. I’ll show you exactly what it looks like to tell Claude to promote your book and watch it go do it.

Agentic AI for Book Launches — I’m going to map out what a launch looks like when AI agents are handling newsletter swaps, research, social scheduling, email sequences, ad monitoring, and sales tracking. Real examples from real launches, not a PowerPoint fantasy.

AI for Your Author Business Summit Preview — The summit is April 21–22. Day 1 is free. Day 2 is the deep dive into agentic AI and Claude Code. I’ll be sharing what to expect and how to get the most out of it.

The mix going forward will be tutorials and industry commentary — practical how-tos alongside the bigger conversations about where this industry is headed.

One More Thing

I won’t be mad if these changes mean it’s time for you to unsubscribe.

I mean that. If you came here for Zapier recipes and Make.com walkthroughs and that’s still what you need, I respect that completely. The Hub content isn’t disappearing and those tools still work. But this newsletter is going somewhere different now, and I’d rather tell you that directly than slowly drift and leave you wondering what happened.

For those of you sticking around: the conversations I had in Ireland, at LBF, at ALLi, and in Savannah all confirmed something I’ve felt for months. The authors who figure out agentic AI in the next twelve months are going to operate at a completely different level. I want this to be the place where you figure it out.

Canterbury coffee remains deeply mid. But the WiFi works and nobody’s asking me to be on a panel, so I’ll take it.

—Chelle