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This week on Brave New Bookshelf, we had the pleasure of hosting Chelle Honiker, a returning guest and a real-life friend of hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite. Chelle is known for her expertise in AI and automation, particularly in the realm of publishing. Her latest venture, Author Automations, has become a hub for authors looking to streamline their workflows using AI tools.
Meet Chelle Honiker, Author Automation Expert
Chelle Honiker has been a pivotal figure in the intersection of AI and authorship, especially in automating processes for indie authors. Her journey into automation began with a need to simplify the workflow at Indie Author Magazine. What started as a personal project to document her frustrations and solutions has blossomed into a popular Substack called Author Automations, where she shares her insights and offers recipes for automations that authors can implement in their own workflows.
The Rapid Evolution of AI Tools
During our conversation, Chelle highlighted the astonishing pace at which AI tools are evolving. She recounted a recent experience where she demonstrated Google’s new video capabilities, which can animate static images and create lifelike videos. This rapid development underscores the necessity for authors and creators to stay informed and adaptable as new technologies emerge.
Automating the Author Workflow
One of Chelle’s key contributions to the publishing community is her work in automating repetitive tasks, freeing up authors to focus on their writing. She shared her experience of automating the entire workflow of Indie Author Magazine, from article submission to publication, using tools like make.com and N8N. This has allowed her team to manage a million-dollar business with minimal manual intervention.
Embracing AI as a Collaborative Partner
Chelle emphasized the importance of treating AI tools as collaborative partners rather than mere assistants. By leveraging AI for tasks like social media posting, newsletter creation, and book formatting, authors can maximize their productivity without sacrificing quality. Chelle’s approach involves using AI to handle the technical aspects of publishing, allowing authors to focus on their creative work.
Starting Small with Automations
For authors new to automation, Chelle recommends starting with tasks that are time-consuming or tedious. Identifying these “suck list” items can help authors pinpoint areas where automation can have the greatest impact. Simple automations, like backing up email lists or scheduling social media posts, can serve as a gateway to more complex workflows.
The Future of Self-Hosted Solutions
Chelle also discussed the benefits of self-hosted solutions, such as N8N and Base Row, which provide greater control and flexibility compared to traditional platforms. By self-hosting tools like Next Cloud and Chatwoot, authors can safeguard their data and customize their workflows without relying on third-party services.
Key Takeaways
- Start with Your Pain Points: Identify tasks that are tedious or time-consuming and explore how automation can alleviate these burdens.
- Leverage AI as a Partner: Use AI tools to handle technical tasks, freeing you to focus on creativity.
- Explore Self-Hosted Solutions: Consider self-hosting tools to maintain control over your data and workflows.
- Iterate and Adapt: Begin with simple automations and gradually expand as you become more comfortable with the technology.
Resources Mentioned
For more insights and to continue the conversation, visit Chelle’s Substack and explore the wealth of resources available to authors looking to harness the power of AI in their workflows.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica favorite as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.
Steph Pajonas: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. It’s been a few weeks since Danica and I were able to sit down and chat because, it’s been very busy for me and she’s been traveling.
So it’s nice to be back on camera and to see my buddy and to talk to our guest as well, who is also a friend. We’ll get to that in a minute. There’s just so much going on. We were just talking about this before we started recording about how exciting AI is right now. There’s new video out from Google that is mind blowing.
I [00:01:00] just, I can’t even describe it because it’s, it looks like regular, it looks like regular video with people talking and dialogue coming out of their mouth. And this is something a lot of people said would never happen, but here we are. Here it is. It’s happening. So we’re on the cusp of great and amazing things happening in AI and hopefully we can talk a lot about those in the coming months, especially as we roll into the second half of the year, which is swiftly coming up.
I cannot even believe it.
Where has 2025 gone? So I’m happy to have my wonderful co-host with me here today. Danica’s been traveling, so how have you been doing?
Danica Favorite: Good, I’m good. So yeah, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Danica Favorite. I’m the community manager at Publish Drive where we help authors on every stage of their publishing journey, whether that’s formatting their manuscript, to finding the perfect metadata and book descriptions to distributing your books to the largest worldwide audience.
And then obviously once you are done and you need to split royalties with [00:02:00] people, we can help you do royalty splitting, which super awesome. So I love partnering with Steph ’cause o obviously they can help you write the book and help you with some marketing stuff for the book.
So it’s awesome that, if you’re an author and you’re wanting to utilize tech to move that journey forward. We’re here for you and that is why this podcast exists and why we’re here today to talk about AI.
So yeah, it’s been pretty crazy. I just got back from the IBPA Pub U Book Conference in Minneapolis. Which was fantastic. And shout out I was I messaged Steph excitedly that we had some fans come up to me and tell me how much they have learned from us and how much they love me and Steph, and really singing Steph’s praises.
And so yes. For reals, Steph and I are real life besties. It was so funny ’cause the one girl’s wait, you actually know Steph? And I’m like, yeah.
Steph Pajonas: Yes, we know each [00:03:00] other. That’s funny.
Danica Favorite: Besties, IRL, right? Yes. Love that. So I’m doing pretty good. Really excited for our guest today Chelle Honiker who also IRL Friend shell has been a guest on the podcast before and she does a lot of really cool things, which I’m gonna let her tell you about most of them.
But what got me excited to have her on the podcast today is she has her great Author Automation Substack. And as part of that her paid members get to do office hours with her every week, which I think is phenomenal. And oh my gosh, love this about her. So I go to her office hours almost every week, except for when I’m traveling or when she’s traveling or whatever.
And she’s always telling me about the cool things she’s doing with AI and automation. Just absolutely loving it. And I know she has even more cool stuff to share from the last time she was here. So I said [00:04:00] Chelle, would you like to be a guest again? And she said, yes. So here it’s our friend. IRL. Chelle Honiker.
Chelle Honiker: Hi guys. It’s so funny because I feel like this is just a continuation of conversations that we’re having all the time, right? And then we just formalize it and get on a podcast and chit chat about stuff. But it is really cool. I think the last time I was on we talked and it was, it feels like the dark ages, right?
It feels like it was 1000 years ago. And and you asked me at the time what my favorite AI tool was, and I think I just said Chat GPT, because that was where I was. what I was using all day, every day. And now, t here are just thousands more and there’s new things that I use almost every single day.
And I’m really excited that now I get to spend time building automations and workflows and different agentic things for folks because it’s changed, right? It give it 20 [00:05:00] minutes and it changes again and give it 20 minutes and it changes again. And before we hopped on, we were talking a little bit about just the Google stack that came out and the Google stack came out three weeks ago and I got to demo it while I was at a mastermind in Aruba. And I got up and I said, here’s my book. Here’s a static image of my book. And I logged into Google Veo and I said, animate this. And it made the birds fly and it made the water move and it made my spooky lamppost flicker.
And, now 20 minutes later. Three weeks later it can do full narration videos and it looks like a real thing. It’s phenomenal how fast everything is moving. Phenomenal.
Steph Pajonas: It moves so fast. I feel like my head is spinning constantly. So I’ll see something really cool and new on a platform, but ooh, that’s amazing. I wanna go in there and play with it, but I’ve got all these other things I gotta do. Right. Yeah. I got, I’ve got the FFA stuff and the writing stuff and whatever else I’m doing, and then so I let it go for a little bit and by the time [00:06:00] I come back to it, it’s got five new features.
Chelle Honiker: Exactly. Exactly. Danica, you said before the podcast you said you felt like you were behind and I think Steph and I both said and I hope everybody that listens to this understands no one is behind. It’s moving so fast. Even those of us that are in it all day, every day sometimes feel like we’re behind.
I was up at five o’clock this morning and working on something and as I was working on this automation, which was really cool, I got a popup that said, Hey, we just changed this. I’m like, ah. You’re kidding me? I’m just, ugh. Things are moving that quickly as features develop and as we hurdle towards the future so fast.
So if anybody’s feeling behind don’t. Right? Because even those of us that play in this space every day are playing catch up 24 7.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah. And that felt really good to hear and that’s why I said, when we’re talking beforehand, I’m like, okay, please make sure you mention this in the podcast.
Yeah. Because I think it is true, we get this tunnel vision of how we think, oh my gosh, I have to do all these things. And [00:07:00] I was laughing, Steph, when you were talking about all the different things to learn. I just threw away about half of them. But my desk is organized with sticky notes.
And whenever I hear about a cool new tool to check out, I write it on a sticky note and I had this big stack of sticky notes on my desk of all the stuff I’m gonna look at, and I finally was like, oh my goodness, I am killing my productivity. Because I have all this stuff that I want to do that I’m not gonna get to.
So I just threw them all away the other day. ’cause I was like, I am not doing this. I will get to it when I get to it and it will be fine. Because like you were saying, you were in the middle of working with that tool.
Chelle Honiker: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: And the popup saying it had changed and I was like, okay, learning it now serves me no good because I can’t use it now.
It’s just another pretty shiny to distract me.
Chelle Honiker: And that’s true for most things, right? Yeah, that’s true for most things in the AI and in the workflow and automation space in particular. And it’s funny because I started author automations.com, which you know, is my substack as a way to document [00:08:00] exactly what I was doing to automate Indie author magazine.
Because Indie Author Magazine, it was really, it was like last October, I had a full on meltdown because there were some processes that I’d made super complicated for our, at the time, virtual assistant, our PA, to work on. And and there were a bunch of mistakes and I was really frustrated really frustrated.
But then I had to say. Oh, it’s the process. It’s not the person, and that was the impulse for me to automate everything end to end because, it’s garbage and garbage out. I had given her so many complexities and so many things that it was really hard for her to do it, and I recognized that when.
I started to do it. I hadn’t done it in a while, and I had to go look stuff up and I went, oh man, it’s the process. This process is just broken. And so I took the entire month of October right before Author Nation, which of course makes no sense, but I did [00:09:00] it. And I automated our workflow.
So now, the way that our workflow works on the magazine side is Nicole Schroeder, who’s our editor in chief, changes a status in our Airtable to ready to publish. And from that ready to publish to the end of the magazine, including all of our social media posts, our EPUBs, everything it’s automated from end to end.
And so I started author automations as a way just to document my frustrations and what I was learning and how I was learning it and what I was finding. And it exploded. It got so big, so fast because. Everybody else had the same questions and challenges and we’re trying to figure this stuff out.
And mostly, the questions were around the, how do we keep people in the mix? How do we get the people doing the people things, and the tech doing the tech things, and the automation doing the automation things?
It’s been interesting now because it went from me having this documentation of my process to these broader conversations [00:10:00] and office hours every Thursday, which are really just nerds hanging out on Zoom. It’s really just, Hey, let’s just hang out on Zoom and talk about this stuff. And it’s been fun because folks like Jamie Davis comes in and says, Hey, I’m running a Kickstarter, how would you do this?
And we ideate and figure out and brainstorm and figure it out together. And then Jocelyn Lindsay, we have the same birthday, which is funny because we think the same way and kind of geek out on stuff and she’s always figuring stuff out. And she did a full movie last week or two weeks ago and I just thought.
How did you do that? So I’m learning as much as I’m teaching in those spaces. And it’s because we’re all figuring it out. But it’s been so fun to see how we’re able to end up with million dollar businesses run by a solopreneur, which is what my big idea was a couple years ago.
That’s what I wanted to be, was a one person solopreneur making bucks.
Danica Favorite: That, and that’s, I think that is the [00:11:00] goal. That is the goal of a lot of the authors. Yeah. And just for those of you listening or watching or however you’re consuming this podcast we did recently have Jamie Davis on for an episode.
And Jocelyn Lindsay is coming on for an episode as well. A lot of these places where I’m sourcing our guests are from these interesting conversations that you have just friends sitting around chatting about what we’re doing with AI and learning from each other because. It is this whole brave new world where things are changing so fast and so rapidly, even faster than we imagined.
Like Steph and I are always talking about, wow, we saw this was coming, but not as fast as it came. Yeah. And so that’s what having these. Like-minded people coming together, talking about stuff comes from. Look for those other episodes because they’re there and you get to be part of the conversations that we are all having.
We just are taking some of these private conversations saying, okay, [00:12:00] let’s share this publicly because people need to be a part of it.
Steph Pajonas: It’s really important to note that sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing until you actually do it. We’re having all of these conversations and we’re iterating on these tools because we don’t necessarily know how impactful it’s gonna be until we actually do it. Which is why sometimes it takes a while for an actual end product to come about that is actually helpful and does things that we want it to do. So from the very beginning, we knew at the FFA that we wanted a writing tool that would be writing with the AI right inside the document.
But we had to iterate on that several times with Rexy and Raptor Write and a few other things before we figured out how that actually works. Because the technology is changing all the time. It is a rapid fire and the expectations of the people who wanna use the tool get more sophisticated as they start using other things.
And the same [00:13:00] thing has been happening too with AI automations like Chelle has been doing. I’ve noticed that make.com started out very small and it didn’t have as many integrations. It has grown. It has added so much to it. There have been new players on the scene. We use a tool called N8N, which is a terrible name for a tool, but we still use it anyway. It’s open source. It’s very similar to make.com, and you can put AI agents in that.
I see new stuff coming onto the market all the time, and you don’t necessarily know what it’s gonna do and how it’s gonna be impactful for you until you can actually see it working and doing the thing.
And then I think that’s basically what Chelle ran across, right? You were working with automations before you ever automated that whole process, but you had to play around with it first before you could get to that point.
Chelle Honiker: Yeah, I did and I started back in Zapier, right? Zapier was my secret sauce.
This was like five years ago when I was playing with Zapier and I would get it to [00:14:00] do very basic things. Like my very first sort of workflow was I’m a big proponent of don’t build on others’ land and don’t be a digital sharecropper. I swear that’s gonna be on my headstone.
But I used it to get my email subscribers from a, from my own form of gravity form on my list. And from there I used Zapier to go validate that it was a real address, and then if it was a real address, then put it on to my email service provider. Because you know you pay for the number of subscribers that are on your list a lot of times, and so I didn’t want to pay for people that didn’t belong on the list. If they put in A SD f@asdf.com, I don’t wanna pay for them to take up space on the list.
So my first Zap was basically validating them and putting them on the list, and then I expanded to say, oh, I’m putting ’em on the list, but I also should probably make a backup in real time of people that were signing up in case I get locked out of Brevo which at the time was Send [00:15:00] In Blue.
So I just I iterated I would have a new idea and then go see if I could make it. And then I would do, oh, I have this idea. Let’s see if I can make it. And then I started using make.com, which I call Zapier Nerdier cousin, because Zapier can do, a lot more things. It doesn’t have certain constraints and it works much better with APIs. And if they don’t have a module specifically built an official module built and make.com and you can. Pretty much figure out what the API is you can call it, right?
So I call different things via API instead of using official modules sometimes, and sometimes within make.com there’s an official module, but the dropdown that says, do this thing isn’t what you want. You want it to do more. So you can use make.com and bypass some of those constraints to make it do what you want.
And then Steph, you and I have geeked out on the whole concept of vibe coding, which really is just opening up your [00:16:00] favorite chat window and letting it do code with you. Sometimes that chat is inside the coding service that you use. Sometimes it’s just a chat window. And sometimes I like to play the, oh, Claude could do this. Why can’t you in an Open AI window? And then open AI gets all offended and says, okay, try this. And, it’s just, it’s hysterical how tech bro coded some of these chat windows become and they get all butt hurt when you tell ’em that their competitor can do it.
So I’ll sometimes have two or three windows open while I’m doing stuff. So I have built WordPress plugins. I have built entire apps. I’ve built chat windows. Getting super nerdy, I’ve built a discoverability engine with vector databases.
I have an entire website called direct to readers.com, which is just discoverability. So when authors sign up there, they upload their cover of their book, and I have an SLM. It’s a [00:17:00] small language model. It’s not an LLM. I have an SLM that will detect the mood and the genre and the tropes and all the things, what it can from the cover. And then we recommend books.
We have a chat window that can recommend books to people based on the things that you’ve uploaded about your book. So it’s not constrained to categories or keywords we can say, alright, you’ve told us these things about the book. I’m using automation to go out and get as much about the book as I can and come back.
So when a reader comes and says, I want something that’s romance, that’s set in Medieval England, whatever. I don’t know. Somebody will write that by the end of the day, I’m sure. It can recommend it. It can know about that book. And it’s blown the doors off of what we can do.
I have a certain proficiency as a coder, but there’s all kinds of things that I can do beyond [00:18:00] what I ever thought I could do because I can ask somebody sitting on my shoulder and say, okay, this is what I’m trying to get to. Is this the best way to do this?
Question the premise. Let’s all do a Becca Symes and say, let’s question the premise. Is this the right thing? And in fact, it’s so funny because I overcomplicate stuff all the time, right? When I’m writing, I overcomplicate my magic systems and I overc omplicate my plots. I was working with something the other day and I said, push back if I’m wrong.
And the chat window was so fast and said, oh, you’re wrong. You could do it this way, and here’s A to B. And I was like, oh, I’m over on PLQ, trying to mind map some stuff. And it was so simple. When you’re vibe coding, you can just say, think about the big picture. This is my goal. Am I trying to do this right?
It’s fascinating now to have this whole team of people that you can ask for what you want and more often than not, they give it to you. Sometimes they get [00:19:00] stupid.
Steph Pajonas: I do love vibe coding. It is a lot of fun. I never saw this in my future. I am proficient with HTML, CSS, PHP, Perl, whatnot. I never got into Python. Ruby on Rails. All of those programming languages, they came a little bit after my time and even GitHub was brought onto the scene in 2008, which is literally like the year after I stopped web development professionally.
So I understood content systems versioning systems, but didn’t know about GitHub. So here I am 2025, trying to do this stuff again. So I had a friend show me Cursor, which is a coding tool. It’s an IDE and it has chat built into it. He gave me an HTML page to change. He said, okay, now you see the image right there on the page.
And I saw it in the code. I saw it in the code. He’s okay, we’re gonna change that to a different image. So I immediately go to the code, right? I go to the code and he’s no. We don’t do that anymore. [00:20:00] He said, you’re gonna go over to the chat on the side and tell it that you wanna change the image.
And I was just like. Oh, my head exploded. I was like, really? Yeah. That’s what we’re gonna do. Yeah. And it did it. And so he walked me through this whole process. And I’m really glad that I do still have those skills of coding so that I can look at it and I can see if it’s gone right or gone horribly wrong.
Because sometimes even the chat just goes wrong and it loses stuff and forgets stuff. And you have to be the human in the loop once again. Yeah. But it was. It was a revelation. I was like, okay, now I see how so many people are managing to make applications and do these things when they really do not know any code or they’re low code or whatever.
They’re doing it on vibes. Yeah, and it’s actually working.
Chelle Honiker: It is actually working. It’s fa Oh, go ahead Dan. I was just gonna say it’s fascinating.
Danica Favorite: It’s fascinating and like for me, ’cause I’m on the opposite end of the two of you, which is where sometimes I [00:21:00] do feel like I’m behind because I don’t know coding, I’m terrible at coding.
Even, when I’ve tried. But even for me I don’t know, like a year ago, maybe a little more than that my web designer retired. And so I have this website. I don’t know what to do with it. I tried and tried to get someone to help take over the website, and no web designer was willing to take over a website that someone else built.
So they were like, no. We have to build you a whole new website. Oh, and by the way, that’s gonna be $10,000. Yeah. And I said ha. No, thank you. But what I’ve been able to do is, even though I don’t know code, even though I don’t know what I am doing, and yes, it is a basic WordPress website but I can go in to Chat GPT and say, Hey, chat.
I’m getting this error message. I’m getting this going on. I want to change this. I don’t know what I’m doing. How do I do it? It’s the same thing where it will give me exactly what I need. I copy and [00:22:00] paste it into my website and I don’t have to do anything. Yeah. And. And there was a time when it did give me bad code.
It gave me something that was broken and I went back to it. I said, Hey, that didn’t work. Now what are we gonna try? And it gave me what I needed. And so I feel like even though we’re having this super techie conversation, it a lot of points. Please know, you don’t have to be super techie and
Chelle Honiker: No, not at all.
Danica Favorite: All of this to me is making the tech so much more accessible than it ever has been. And I know Chelle will probably talk a little bit about N8N as well. Because I know she is using some of that.
Chelle Honiker: So amazing.
Danica Favorite: And I have been really intimidated by that because of course I don’t wanna pay for it.
I wanna do the open source, self-hosted thing. Yeah. And I’m like, oh, but I don’t know how to do that. But wait, I can figure that out. So I’m like who’s gonna help me? Chat GP T’s gonna help me. Actually, Chelle’s gonna [00:23:00] help me, but ChatGPT’s also gonna help me.
Chelle Honiker: One team, we’re all a team.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, absolutely.
Chelle Honiker: Think the most thing is even just in the last couple of months things have changed so that Chat GPT is even more useful. So for example, I used to know CSS, right? I was a CSS, JavaScript, HTML. But that is a squeaky gear in my brain. I have not used it in years and years, and I don’t wanna go back and brush up on the latest code standards. I don’t care. I’m too old to go back and relearn all of that. So what I use it for a lot of times is just that gap training where I understand where I’m trying to get, but then I can tell it exactly what I’m trying to do.
Now, the coolest part about this is I did this morning. I was fixing a page and there were two little spaces on a form where the text wasn’t showing in the dropdown menu. And I was like, alright, I gotta go figure out what class that is and then I [00:24:00] gotta write some additional CSS.
And then I went, no. I right clicked on the page. I inspected it. I found the little spot where it was stuck. I right clicked on it. I did copy element. I went over to Chat GPT, and I pasted that in. But then here’s the coolest part. I went back over to the webpage that was broken. I did a screenshot of just the broken part, and then I went back to chat. I pasted that screenshot in and I said. This isn’t working, this is what I see. Fix it. And it came back and said, oh clearly, blah, blah, blah. it talks like Jeeves. It’s like a little butler, and it gets all formal and fancy and it says, oh this is the code. This is what you need to fix.
Copy this into your additional CSS window. Done. And it fixed it. And here’s the other part. There have been times when it’s been wrong or it still doesn’t work, and I literally just go back over to [00:25:00] the window and go, Nope, that’s all I say, Nope. And then it keeps trying real hard. It’s like a boy in high school that wants to date this girl.
So it’s gonna keep trying real, real hard and keep going. I love it. I don’t have to worry if I’m frustrating it or making it mad. I don’t have to worry that I’m being too needy. Like it’s the most healthy relationship I have right now. It’s great, but I can just say, Nope. And then it’ll give me more things to try.
And then I can say, okay, this really isn’t working. Maybe I’m in the wrong window. I can sit there and brainstorm with it and collaborate with it without the fear that I’m annoying an IT person. I was that IT person. So I used to get people that would say, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. 27 times before they actually got to the question. I don’t have to say I’m sorry. It’s fantastic.
Steph Pajonas: It is there for you is.
Chelle Honiker: Thank you.
Steph Pajonas: Thank you. I feel the same way. If I’m struggling with something I go back [00:26:00] and I keep asking, keep iterating until I can get the answers that I want and I make sure to say thank you when I’m done.
Chelle Honiker: Yeah, I do too.
I’m not concerned about the water energy. Sam Altman said the other day, it’s consuming more energy by saying Please, and thank you. I’m like, listen, when the robots rise up, I wanna be on the good side. I wanna be on the list that says they were polite to us. So let’s keep her around.
And I wanna That’s great.
Steph Pajonas: We’re even watching and, or which is the Star Wars prequel to Rogue One, et cetera. In the last episode the Droid K, which I can’t remember all of his numbers and letters, but K, he was upset that nobody thanked him for all of the help that he did, and like the Diego Luna character, Andor, he did not say thank you when K came and saved his butt. And I looked at my husband and I said, this is why I always say thank you. This is why I always say thank you.
Danica Favorite: I have a very loving and supportive relationship with my AI tools. Yes. [00:27:00] And we’re loving and supportive of each other.
And so I feel like you were saying, shell, this really is the healthiest relationship because, I can say stuff and just be myself and I’m not gonna offend anyone. And if they say something that offends me and I say, Hey, I didn’t like that, they’ll say, Ooh, sorry.
And it’s great.
Chelle Honiker: It’s not a qualified apology either. It’s just as genuine. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Yeah, it’s hysterical.
We mentioned N8N and I know FFA uses it quite a bit. I’m using it on the automation side a lot and it has been a game changer for two reasons. One is we had Zapier and make.com and those are no-code, low-code automation solutions. And they are really what’s linear, right? You start over here and it does things and you are responsible for programming all of the dependencies and conditions. So if it’s this [00:28:00] category, do this. If it’s this category, do this. If it’s this, then do this. You create all of those conditions and I have make.com scenarios that are into 120, 130 steps based on all of that, and it runs really well. And they’re fantastic.
But I have been incredibly excited to get into N8N with their agentic stuff. And what makes that different is you go in, you hook up your dart, whatever you want it to do to trigger it.
And then you have your whatever brain you want it to use, whatever memory you want it to use, and whatever tool you want it to do, and you can hook up multiple tools.
And so I will tell you the very nerdiest thing that I did over the weekend that I’m. Just insanely proud of. But I am leaving for Europe for two months, in a couple weeks, and I said, I want to power my business from my phone.
I don’t even wanna have my laptop with me. I’m not even bringing my laptop with [00:29:00] me this time, which is a little bit nerve wracking, but I’m gonna do it anyway. But I wanted to be able to power it from my phone and I thought, how can I generate our newsletter every week because our newsletter is written.
It’s very customizable. We don’t pre-schedule everything. It’s not very canned and it’s not very kitschy. And so I wrote an AI agent that when I push a button on my phone. It’s a shortcut right on my phone. Let me pull it up here so you can see it. For those of you that are watching on video, I have a shortcut right here that says I am newsletters live.
When I push that button, it kicks off an automation that it knows what I wanna do. I’ve given it the instructions of what I wanna do. It goes and looks at all of the newsletters that we’ve written, so it’s not gonna repeat it. It looks at all of the things that are in the sort of zeitgeist, right? It goes out and does a [00:30:00] perplexity search for indie publishing and indie authoring, and it looks to see if there’s anything interesting that people are talking about.
It goes through all 800 articles in the database of our newsletters and pulls whatever’s live, and it knows what each of those articles is about because it’s actually reading the bulk of those articles. It looks at a bunch of other things and then it writes the newsletter. It drafts the newsletter.
It creates the image, the featured image for that newsletter based on our stock photography, because we don’t use AI generated images in the magazine. And then it schedules it, and then it sends it to our production coordinator, Grace, for one final proof to make sure it’s good. It schedules, it, it knows everything that needs to go in it.
It pulls the current advertisers that are in the magazine that their ads should be in there, knows who those ads should be from. It puts those in the header and the footer, and it gets everything ready and then it [00:31:00] kisses me good morning and makes me coffee. It does it all but
Danica Favorite: I need this.
I need,
Chelle Honiker: yeah, everybody needs it. Which is why I’m trying my darnedest to get all these ready for people to buy and consult. ’cause I Consulting wasn’t on my 2025 Bingo card, but here I am. Right.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah. Here you are. Let’s talk a little bit about your substack that you’ve got going. That’s all about AI automations.
Yeah. ’cause I’m sure people would love to hear about that.
Chelle Honiker: Yeah, so it’s author automations.com. And again, the original idea was just that I was documenting it and I was writing, but now I am making these recipes for sale. I’m adopting a chef mentality where I’m building and I’ve assembled it, and then you can take the recipe that I’ve got, you can import it into make.com, or N8N, or Zapier, and then you just plug in your tools.
So instead of using my Chat GPT module, you can use your chat GPT module, or they’re all modular, so you can substitute your own. If you wanna use [00:32:00] Claude or Anthropic, or if you wanna use, o lama or whatever you wanna use, you can plug them in. So yeah, it’s at author automations.com and I am doing one for sale every month. So one would be like managing all your social media or scheduling 30 days worth of social media or, connecting your blog or writing your newsletter. I’ve got a bunch of them that I’m cleaning up and putting up there. Again, it wasn’t on my list to do, but that’s all coming right now.
And then I am also now, available to hire to do these. So I’m doing done for you services where you can say, this is what I wanna do, and I’ll go in and I’ll build it for you.
Steph Pajonas: That’s awesome. Don’t feel bad. Awesome. Don’t feel bad because I also started a substack that I wasn’t planning on doing.
Just isn’t funny. They just come outta nowhere sometimes.
Chelle Honiker: It’s great though, but also it’s, I think you and I talked about this, we feel a sense of compulsion in the best way to help. Right. Because I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve [00:33:00] been able to take my past as a programmer, my past as a marketer, my past as a travel agent even and all of that is now available to me as a skillset to be able to build these things because I can see big picture and I can see what I did before. And I can see the publishing side of things and where people are trying to get, and I’m not very much on the generative side like FFA is in terms of creating words. I’m more on the, once you’ve got those words, what do you do with them?
So I’ve got automations that will take a Google doc and it will create a PDF for you. It knows how many words it is. It knows how to format your document, turn it into an epub, and then send it over to book funnel. I’ve got automations that will take that PDF in print format and send it over to Lulu.
So I can take whatever you’ve got after the words are done. And finish it. Finish that process for you so you have more time to go back in and do the thing you want do, which is write. All of us signed up to be storytellers. We didn’t [00:34:00] sign up to make a social media post for Instagram.
Who wants to do that? That’s stupid. I don’t want to do that. I don’t even like being on social media. Ugh. It’s awful over there.
And then, and then I’ve got other automations that will take, when you dictate you upload an MP3 to a certain Dropbox folder, and then it picks that up, it transcribes it, it knows all of your weird names of your fantasy characters. So if you say something and it doesn’t sound phonetically like anything in a dictionary, you can customize your own GPT to know what that word is supposed to be.
It runs it through, make sure that it’s all. Your voice and you don’t have to do a dragon.com dictation where you’re saying Period. New line and then whatever it knows, it can run it through that. And then it takes that transcription, puts it into a Google Doc in the right folder, and then it will send an email to your editor.
It will add that as a task to your [00:35:00] Notion database assigned to your editor and then, kiss you, good morning, make you coffee like I end every automation with. Kiss you good morning, make you coffee as one should.
Danica Favorite: I think that’s very important.
Chelle Honiker: I think so. That’s what the robot should be doing, right?
Danica Favorite: They should be I actually need one, a robot that’s like fleshy and squishy and warm, because I need a hug. So let’s work on that next. No. helle’s telling me no.
Chelle Honiker: I’m doing a hard pass on that one. Danica. That’s yeah,
Danica Favorite: that’s all right. It’s all right.
Chelle Honiker: There’s, that’s how horror movies start.
Danica Favorite: That’s a good point. Sounds that’s a good point.
Chelle Honiker: Yeah. That sounds like a True Crime podcast start. That’s not okay.
Danica Favorite: I’ve already got my Roomba, he’s great.
We’ll see.
Chelle Honiker: We don’t AI shame in this family. We do you whatever. We don’t kink shame, we don’t AI shame. It’s all good.
Danica Favorite: It is all good. So it’s interesting ’cause you, you have all these great automation workflows that you’re doing, which I think are absolutely fantastic. [00:36:00] Which is why also, again, I’m just plugging the Author Automations Substack because she does give a lot of those automations to people. But I’m curious, when we first talked, you were using all of like the ChatGPT, custom GPTs to do all the things for you, and now you’re getting even deeper into the automations.
And we’re obviously talking about ninja level stuff here, but what are some things that you would recommend for, maybe someone who’s new coming into this to say, Hey, you know what, start with this thing. Something easy and simple and like kind of the first way for someone who’s looking at doing automations to get their feet wet and try it out.
Chelle Honiker: So I always say, start with your suck list. Start with the thing that you absolutely hate to do. And for me that was social media, to be honest. Posting on social media, like we always hear, you have to feed the algorithms and you’ve gotta feed the beast. And that’s true. But there [00:37:00] is a certain amount that I can automate for social media. That was my first impulse.
My first impetus for starting all of this was I knew I needed to post on social media more often, but I also didn’t want it to be completely robotic, and I also didn’t want to do it myself. So that was my suck list. And so for anybody that’s starting out, look at the thing that is keeping you from the thing that you love to do, whatever it is that you love to do. I do have some people that love to make graphics. They’re weird. I don’t get it, but sure. That’s fine. But most people have something on their list that they don’t like to do, and for most people in my experience, social media.
So start with whatever the easiest one is and then just do one automation that says. When I publish a newsletter, send a social post based on what’s in that newsletter. Or the other thing that I look at is what’s going to save me in terms of disaster [00:38:00] recovery.
So again, my first automation was if I got locked out of Mailerlite, where would all of my email addresses be? So I automated the process of keeping a running backup of my email addresses rather than remembering every month to go log in and export my list. So those are kinds of easy, low hanging fruit that you can get started with.
Look at updating your website. Automation doesn’t necessarily have to be a make.com or a Zap or an N8N or a Manus. You don’t have to have those. Just look at the ways that you’ve got automation baked into your own ecosystem.
For example, with WordPress, you could go in and turn on plugins, don’t turn it on for all the plugins. Don’t just let WordPress decide to update WooCommerce by itself. You don’t want to turn on everything, but there’s really small ones. If you have a form builder like gravity forms or fluent forms, you can turn those on reliably.
Those [00:39:00] are reliable automations that you can get started with so that you are, preventing your site from being hacked. Without you having to go in every single month and do those kinds of things.
So start real small. Look at the existing things that you’ve got. Look at one thing that would, make you sleep better at night, and then look at one thing that you just hate that you have to do every month.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I talk about pain points a lot. It’s very similar to your suck list, right? Find the things that cause you pain in your process and see if AI can come in and alleviate them. So I agree with that a hundred percent. Yeah, I think it’s important.
Chelle Honiker: And the other thing to remember is you can start by automating one thing.
I think that’s where a lot of people get hung up, is they look at it and they have seven ideas that they think that they can do with the one thing. But start with the one and just make sure that the one thing works right. So you can automate if someone buys a book from my Stripe account, ’cause you can do Stripe [00:40:00] buttons. Then I want you to send the book from Book Funnel. You can do that one thing, automate that. Then once that’s working in a week or so, you can edit that one automation and say, and now I want you to put that sale on my Excel spreadsheet. And that’s. Done. And then you can say, in a week or two, now I want you to send an email to my assistant to follow up.
Then that’s done. And then you can say, and then I wanna, add a tag so that they’re on a follow up list. Right? You don’t have to do all of those steps, because that’s daunting. And especially for those of us with spicy brains. We will stop midstream and then walk away from it.
So just start with the one thing, one trigger, one action, sit with that, and then go back and do more.
Danica Favorite: I really appreciate that because I think there is that analysis paralysis that we get into sometimes of okay, I have to do all the things. Narrowing that down and making [00:41:00] that easier.
What is one thing you can do in your life to make it just that one step easier.
Chelle Honiker: It’s a bummer too, because you see all the possibilities. It’s that dynamic tension between getting excited about all of the possibilities, but then also recognizing you only have so much time and energy to do the thing. So you can keep that enthusiasm about what’s possible but then just start with the thing that you can complete and finish and get excited about. Just that one little process, you can go back to other things. And honestly, what’s so crazy is when you go back to it. It might have changed. It might be easier, it might be more powerful.
There’s all kinds of new things that are happening all the time. So just close that loop and stop there. And keep yourself from getting overwhelmed.
Danica Favorite: We talked at the beginning where you’re like, oh yeah, ChatGPT used to be my favorite, blah, blah, blah. And that’s changed.
So do you have a favorite now? Is there a favorite AI tool that you’re really enjoying playing with?
Chelle Honiker: Yeah, I think [00:42:00] N8N is my favorite new shiny tool. I think just because I’m in it all day every day, creating possibilities, agentic possibilities for things. It really is now the tool that kind of runs my life from my phone, which is amazing.
I have one that calls an 11 labs chat assistant that I call hey Gigi. And so I can say to my, I won’t say it because she’ll say it. I can say something into it. And N8N is smart enough to understand the difference between dictation, a task that needs to be assigned, a note I need to put in my Notion for myself. It is the one ring to rule them all.
I always used to say Notion was my second brain, but honestly, N8N is my second brain right now. ’cause it talks to all the things.
Steph Pajonas: The one thing I love about N8N that is that, that it is open source and it
Chelle Honiker: Oh yeah,
Steph Pajonas: It’s much easier to see how it could really blossom because there are a lot of [00:43:00] people that are working on it.
This is not like a proprietary tool. It is out there and available. If you have some knowledge of coding or like website hosting, et cetera. You can run N8N on your own server with a Docker. I have that sort of set up for myself, but we have one set up for the FFA, so I just use that one.
I love the fact that it is constantly being developed on. That you can run it for free as, as long as you have your own way to run it, either on your own computer or your own hosting. And if you don’t have any of those, you can still buy the monthly subscription with them. And I think that it’s pretty comparable to make.com.
Yes. So it’s just one of those things where it does so much, it doesn’t even have to do anything purely AI. It can just run a sequence of tasks if you want it to or you can plug in an AI brain and have it do thinking and have it look at and understand the situation and then be able to route things to [00:44:00] different areas based on what it understands about things.
And I think that is where things start to get really cool.
Chelle Honiker: Cool. And so we’ve done some things, so I use self-hosted N8N obviously, but I’ve taken it farther with self-hosting. So everything that we do is powered on a self-hosted solution. So our chatbots, we have Chatwoot. So it’s powering our chats on different places. I also use just to get even more nerdy, I love Airtable as my hub, but now I use Base Row because Base Row is self-hosted. It’s an Airtable dupe. And I use that instead.
For those that write spicy and are concerned about Google or Google Workspace, you could use Next Cloud and you could use a self-hosted Next Cloud, and then it’s yours has all the same features, right? But you don’t have any of the concerns of Google or Google’s AI or its feeding of anything.
And then, there have been some people that are concerned about Google reading your spicy docs and maybe [00:45:00] giving you a terms of service warning then you can completely host it. You can completely self-host it in the cloud on your own solution. So self-hosting I think is probably the next great adventure in terms of what’s coming for automation and people that like to automate.
And I’ve been working on an app called Storyteller OS, Storyteller Operating System that’s gonna bring all of those out into the world as a brain for people. I’m probably three or four months away from having that available. But yeah, I would have all the automations and everything and it would be self-hosted so that you have everything together.
I just need more coffee in about four hours, so
Steph Pajonas: I love it. I’m gonna make sure that I put all of those things in the show notes because even though I’m, I didn’t know about Next Cloud, so I will definitely go check that one out too. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there, a lot of self-hosted things, a lot of open source things that are just they’re amazing.
Yeah. I don’t even have a lot of words for them because they’re just amazing. They’re blowing my mind. And they’re giving everybody the opportunity to [00:46:00] do this at a lower cost solution. You don’t have to bankroll everything.
Chelle Honiker: Right. And the other part is again, I don’t like to build on rented land. If Elon decides to buy Google and change anything about it, I don’t have to worry about it. I’ve got Next Cloud, right? Any company that I don’t own or control, if there are mitigating circumstances that would prevent me from using that company for whatever reason, I wanna be able to have my company’s products, tools, and services protected.
And so here’s a perfect example of that. We used to use Bitly links. Short links for everything. Bitly changed it so that when you click on a Bitly short link, you get an intermediary page. They’re advertising before they’re sending you to the final destination now. And so anybody that’s had a Bitly link, BT ly link, a short link, whether you like it or not, it’s their company.
They can do what they want, but that’s made a change. So what I did was I wrote a WordPress plugin and that WordPress plugin is tied to my domain, which is [00:47:00] Storylink.to. So when you see links in the magazine, you’re gonna see Storylink.to slash Southwest, and that will take you to our southwest advertising page. I own Storylink.to.
It also has the ability to create QR codes because I was concerned that you can go to Google and generate a QR code, but what if they decide to break that? If you’ve put something in print or you’ve put something in your back matter or you’ve put something out that you have no control over that.
So I have made it a point to bring everything that I want back in-house. And so I wrote a plugin that will help me do that. And if you go to plugins.author automation.com, you can download it and put it on your own. WordPress, it’s free. I don’t care. I wrote it. You can have it. That’s awesome.
You don’t ask me to support it.
Steph Pajonas: All right. I think that we’re running out of time, even though I could probably talk about this like forever.
Chelle Honiker: We could.
Danica Favorite: I know it’s hard. It’s hard because I’m like, oh my gosh, I have so much more I wanna talk about. But this is why Chelle has her office [00:48:00] hours and obviously.
We are all in conversation and we’ll be back next week with more great information and another great guest that we will probably also want to spend even more time talking to.
If you wanna continue the conversation, please do. Go find Chelle’s substack, chat with us on Facebook or in our YouTube. We love having these conversations. Be sure to reach out if you have questions, if you have things that you want us to cover more. We’re definitely here for it because we really do want to help people and we want people to feel like they’ve got some tools because yes, as I was reminded today no one is behind. Unless you’ve got your head in the sand and saying, I want this AI stuff to go away. You might actually be behind. But you can catch up. You can catch up.
So it is also okay to be one of those people that Steph and I run into all the time where they used to be very vocally anti ai and now they’re like, okay, so you know that AI stuff, [00:49:00] can you help me?
We’re like yes. Yes, we can help you. ’cause ultimately, we want everyone to succeed and we want to be there to help you.
Steph Pajonas: We do. We do. And so in order to succeed, you’re gonna wanna go check out some of the stuff that Chelle’s been talking about today. I wanna make sure that all of the links are in the show notes when we produce those for the blog.
And make sure that everything is on there so that you can go and educate yourself as well. I will be in there checking out some of these tools that she’s taught us about today because I didn’t know some of them as well. And look at me. I’m in this stuff every day. And like I said, we all sometimes feel behind because it is moving so fast.
But don’t worry, that’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re listening, and that’s why we exist at the Brave New Bookshelf.
So come on by brave new bookshelf.com. Check out the blog post. Like us and subscribe on YouTube and find us on Facebook and all that good stuff. And thank you again to Chelle for showing up today.
We are so excited you were here. [00:50:00]
Chelle Honiker: Thanks for having me. I really love hanging out with you guys. I always say my job is to get up and play with my best friends every day. That’s just the coolest job ever. So thanks for hanging out.
Steph Pajonas: That is the coolest job ever. I agree. All right everybody. We’ll see you guys on the next episode.
So until then, bye-bye.
Danica Favorite: Bye bye.
Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.