Episode 77 - Vibe Coding and Custom Author Tools with Cassie Alexander

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Cassie Alexander is a veteran writer with over 25 years of experience across traditional and indie publishing. While she works as a nurse in her “day job,” her author life is anything but traditional. Cassie has become a leader in the author community for her “vibe coding” approach—using AI to build custom tools that handle the technical drudgery of publishing.

From automating Facebook ads to building her own newsletter infrastructure, Cassie’s goal is to create a “fleet” of automated systems that support her creative work, allowing her to focus on what she loves most: storytelling.

The Power of a Cloud-Based “Command Center”

A central theme of our conversation was Cassie’s move away from “brittle” tools like Excel or Airtable toward a more robust solution: Supabase.

Supabase is a cloud-based SQL database that Cassie uses as her “Author Command Center.” Unlike a standard spreadsheet, this database can “talk” directly to AI models like Claude or ChatGPT. By storing her book data, blurbs, keywords, and even ad creative in Supabase, she allows her AI agents to pull exactly what they need to execute tasks without her having to manually copy and paste.

Slashing Subscriptions: From $400 to $1.30

One of the most mind-blowing segments of the episode was Cassie’s breakdown of how she used AI to replace expensive monthly subscriptions.

Newsletters: Cassie was previously paying nearly $400 a month for services like Omnisend and Klaviyo to manage 13,000 subscribers. By building her own system using AWS SES (Simple Email Service) and Supabase, she reduced the cost of sending an email to her entire list to just $1.30.
Linktree & Calendly: Instead of paying for premium versions of these tools, she had Claude code custom versions that she hosts on her own website.
Shopify Apps: She replaced paid backup apps with custom “Cron jobs” that automatically back up her store data to her database.

As Cassie puts it: “Does it cost more to open up a longer spreadsheet than a shorter spreadsheet? No. We’ve been getting ripped off.”

Scaling to 50 Languages with “Claude Skills”

Cassie recently released a nonfiction manifesto titled How to Think with AI. To test her automation systems, she translated the book into 49 other languages (50 total).

To manage the Herculean task of uploading 50 versions of a book to various retailers, she used Claude Skills and Claude Cowork to automate these tasks. These are essentially bespoke workflows where she trains Claude to interact with a browser to:

Register ISBNs through Bowker.
Upload files and metadata to Kobo and Google Play.
Generate Amazon Attribution links in bulk.

By teaching the AI the “skill” of navigating these platforms, she can outsource the “grunt work” that usually keeps authors chained to their desks.

Marketing for the “Bots” and the Humans

Cassie and Danica discussed the evolving nature of metadata. In the age of AI, your book’s blurb and keywords aren’t just for readers—they are for the “web crawlers” and “bots” that determine visibility.

Cassie uses a custom “Keyword Drill Rig” to find “blue water” keywords—terms with high search volume but low competition. She emphasized that authors must refresh their metadata and back matter more frequently (potentially every three months) to stay relevant to the algorithms that now rule the digital storefronts.

Debunking the Myth of the “Tech Genius”

Despite the complexity of her systems, Cassie insists that she isn’t a professional coder. She started “vibe coding” just over a year ago. Her secret? Having faith that she won’t “break the internet” and using AI as a mentor.

“If any activity is an activity I’m going to have to do more than three times in my author career,” she says, “I’m figuring out a way to outsource it to AI.”

Favorite Tools & Recommendations

Cassie highlighted several tools that are essential to her automated workflow:

Supabase: Her primary cloud database for storing all author data.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Her go-to for interacting with the browser and executing “skills.”
GPT Codex: Used as a secondary “check” to verify the code Claude writes.
AWS SES: For sending high-volume newsletters at a fraction of the cost of traditional providers.
Shopify API: For connecting her direct sales store to her AI tools.

Key Takeaways from This Episode

A longer spreadsheet doesn’t cost more money. Don’t let subscription services overcharge you for simply having a larger list.
Build your own “Skills.” Use AI to automate repetitive tasks like uploading books to wide retailers or generating attribution links.
Automate to focus on the “Passion Projects.” Automation isn’t about replacing the human; it’s about clearing the “laborious, dumb shit” off your plate so you can write.
Think Globably. AI translation and automated distribution make it possible to reach international markets that were previously cost-prohibitive.
Refresh your metadata. Stay “top of mind” for AI web crawlers by updating your blurbs and back matter regularly.

Resources Mentioned

Transcript

Speaker: [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 Brief New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press, where we’re teaching authors how to use AI in any part of their process. And we are publishing AI forward books on the press. We just launched this is, uh, late March here and we just launched three books to the press last week, uh, that was a lot of work on my part. I’m the production manager too, so I’m getting all the books onto the website, out to the retailers and whatnot. And we are ramping up to hopefully publish even more books next month and more and more until we’re publishing about 10 to 12 books a month on the press.

And that is our goal for the year. A lot of small presses [00:01:00] only aim for like 50 to 60 books a year, and we are aiming for like a hundred, 120 eventually, that’s where we’d like to be probably in 2027, 2028. So we are doing that, and that is a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun. It’s great seeing all the books go out to people.

All right, so that is all in my world, except for the fact that it’s beautiful and it’s lovely outside, and now I have allergies, so I will try to mute myself as much as possible during this podcast, so you don’t hear all of my sniffling and my coughing. Lucky you. Okay, now I’m here with my wonderful cohost, Danica Favorite.

How are you doing today?

Danica Favorite: I’m good. Thank you. It’s so funny when I have beautiful weather, you have gross weather and you’re talking about beautiful weather and it’s been beautiful here. But today it is cold and so I’m like, what the heck? So apparently it’s opposite day.

Anyway, so Steph is dealing with allergies. I am dealing with lots of brain fog today. So, um, [00:02:00] here we are just muddling through. As always, you guys know we’re humans ’cause we just roll with the punches. And so 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 the journey from getting their book manuscript formatted to creating the perfect metadata and book description, and then distributing it to the widest audience possible.

And then finally, once it’s up for sale, we can help you with some store promotions as well as if you have co-authors splitting the royalties once that book is selling. So lots of options between Publish Drive and Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press. And I love that we get to really help authors and find ways to educate authors and give authors what they need.

That’s so important to all of us. I think that I speak for both of us [00:03:00] when I say that for Steph and I, all the stuff we do in the author community really is because we love being authors and we love helping authors, and this is always our love letter to the world and our gift to people to really help them understand AI and how AI can help them in their writing process, no matter how you choose to AI. As always, use it how you want. Don’t use it, just don’t be mean to people who don’t use it in a way that you approve of. And so that was really said nicely. I’m gonna give myself a pat on the back for that. Um, and today we have Cassie Alexander back with us. Some of you may remember her previous episode and we talked all the things including mean people shut up. I think we also didn’t say that as nicely as we’re saying it now, but you all get the point. And so we didn’t get to a lot of the cool things that Cassie is doing, [00:04:00] but one of the things that just has me going, oh my gosh, this is so cool that she’s doing is a lot of work with automations and how she’s automating things in her process and, I’ll be honest. I, uh, I follow Cassie online and I sit there and watch the stuff she’s doing, going like, oh my gosh, I need to learn that. I need to learn, that. I need to take, I need to pay for that. And the answer right now is, no Danica slow your roll. You don’t have time for this. You can take a break and it’s still gonna be there.

And I want all of you to say the same thing to yourself. If you are super excited about what Cassie’s doing and you’re like, yes, I need this and you’re gonna go do it, please go do it. If you’re like me and you just are like, oh, I wanna do this, and then you look at your calendar and you’re like, no.

No. Please honor that no in yourself. Because Cassie and I were talking before we started recording and uh, it was really funny ’cause I think this was even before [00:05:00] Steph got in here was I was like, this is really frustrating because I feel like the more it takes stuff off my plate to do the more it gives me to do.

And Cassie was like, yeah, I know, except in my case, it’s just allowing me to do all the things I wanted to do before. And I also feel that exceptionally hard because, um, you know, before I was picking and choosing between which projects were the have to do, want to do, need to do, I was doing that whole Eisenhower matrix thing except very imperfectly because I felt like there were so many things that I just had to do, even if I didn’t wanna do ’em, I just had to do it for whatever reason.

But now that I have more bandwidth to do more things, now I’m adding some of these passion projects onto my plate. Which, again, I may be biting off more than I can chew and that’s okay. I may or may not have just started dictating two separate brand new book series over the past couple days.

So I’m actually really looking [00:06:00] forward to talking to Cassie and hearing from her about some of these automations because even though I’m like, no, not right now. The truth is I think that we can all benefit in some small way from the stuff that she has to share with us. Cassie, tell us about all the things and also give us a quick intro of yourself for those who missed your previous episode.

Tell us about yourself briefly, but then let’s go straight into all the automation stuff you’re doing.

Cassie Alexander: Awesome. Yeah. So I am Cassie Alexander and I’ve been a writer for over 25 years. I’ve had, I’ve been traditionally published, I’ve done Indie, I’ve tried to be published on every single platform at least once, ’cause I always like to try new things. And I’m also like a nurse in real life, uh, that kind of holding the fort down for the health insurance. So, yeah. Um, I have been basically automating, hopefully all of my life right now. Um. I, I guess, let me just hop back. There’s like three things I think I would like to talk about on this.

One is like how automation can [00:07:00] save you money potentially if you’re willing to go there. Another is how it can save you time. And the third is if we get to it, just like how fun it is to do this. ’cause I really enjoy it a lot.

So, um.

Danica Favorite: I do wanna get to the fun part because I think that people hear the word automation.

I know I do. And I have heart palpitations so I wanna hear about the fun part, especially.

Cassie Alexander: Let’s start there then, because what always gave me heart palpitations is stupid Facebook ads. Because I’ve had Facebook jerk my chain like two times in the past 13 months, I’ve had my ad account canceled.

I’ve got in, I’ve been in like some cycle where they’re like, you need to prove who you are with possibly your blood type, but I have no way to actually give them that information. This most recent time was particularly frustrating because I began a new ad account and I associated it with my real life name because I was like, surely if I do this and I can show them my birth certificate with this name on it, then they will give me my account back.

But no, what happened is I lost my account. [00:08:00] My, my actual. Original Facebook account that I’ve had, ever since they came out. So anyways, so yeah, when I deal with the backend of Facebook, I just feel all this tension because I feel like they’re like against me and they’re gonna screw me over.

But one of my friends, like literally this past Sunday was all like, no, you have to get a Facebook API key. It’s so much easier once you have an API key. And I was like, okay, I’m a big girl, I can do this. I can get into the back end of Facebook and, what that has allowed me to do is to offload the creation of my Facebook ads, and I’m gonna talk you guys a little bit through that.

Um. How it happens because the, these steps are how you can control all the data in your author life in a way that you will find meaningful because once the data is up in the cloud, then you can use it from anywhere. So, um, a lot of people go in and make all their automations through Notion or Airtable or Google Sheets or whatever, and those are great, but they’re re they’re old school now [00:09:00] because.

They’re more brittle and they require an additional layer of interaction with them to like access that information and get it out. So what I’ve been using to create, basically like my whole author command center is Supabase, which is like a database that lives in the clouds and it’s an SQL database if you know what that means.

But to be honest, do I know what that means? Not really. All I need to know is that my AIs can talk to it, but the beauty of the Supabase is that Claude can talk to it. GPT can talk to it. Anything can talk to it, and I can have a project up there that’s a million bajillion lines long and like a magical Excel file with all these schema and stuff that the AIs can keep track of for me.

And I don’t have to look at it. I don’t have to plan it. I just have to say, yo Claude, go up there and get me the information I need. Or as I create information, I say, let’s back it up into Supabase. And so now that I have access to this Facebook API key, an API key [00:10:00] being like the mechanical handshake that you need to have between one program talking to another program so I can agentically with my instance of Claude say, all right, we’re gonna make Facebook ads for this property. You go look on the Supabase from the Supabase, you can pull like the five ad creative texts that we came up with last time. And then you can look on my machine into the folder that I’ve created full of my videos and images, and you can snag those and put those onto Facebook for me, and I don’t have to touch jack shit on Facebook.

Because once it’s trained how to do what I want it to do, it can. So, that is a beautiful thing. Um, and that’s, that’s where I started off with a lot of fear. Like I wasn’t always like this, like legit, I am a nurse. I’m still a nurse, so I didn’t start vibe coding until January of last year, but like people are all like, wow, you do all this stuff now.

But like, there’s no reason that other people can’t do exactly the things [00:11:00] that I have done. All I have to do, I just have faith in the fact that I’m not gonna break things so bad I can’t come back from them. You know, maybe if I were still in my original Facebook ad account, I would be more nervous about it.

But now I’m like, I already know what it’s like to rebuild all this stuff. It sucks. I can do it again though. And I have all my stuff backed up someplace else. So what if I let it run riot, let the AI run riot over my computer? It’s all right. It’s not gonna delete anything that I can’t get to.

So let’s push it and let’s see what we can get to. So, now that I’ve talked about Supabase, and I really wanna impress that upon you guys, like Supabase will unlock the rest of your automation life.

Danica Favorite: I like this a lot because the Supabase stuff, and Steph, I would like her to chime in as well, is that, for a while for some of the FFA automations they were using Supabase a lot. And I remember I, and I have a Supabase account. I didn’t fully understand all the stuff that I was doing in it, but I basically did what Joseph said to do and it worked and that’s all that [00:12:00] matters. Joseph, by the way, is the super cool FFA programmer who is gonna be on the show in a few weeks to talk to us, but I really do like the idea of Supabase because again, like when I was looking at that and trying to figure things out, like I said, not techie, but I now know that AI can explain to me how to use what I need to use. But tell people a little bit about why Supabase is so cool. Because one of the things I really liked about it is it’s not expensive, which all these other tools like Airtable and all that are really expensive.

Cassie Alexander: It’s not expensive at all. And what’s amazing is that they charge you like on a per project basis. And I was like talking to my agents and they, I was like, should I open up new projects for this? And they’re like, no, we want all of your publishing stuff in one place. And that’s made everything easy.

So it basically then. I went on this mission, so like, um, my link, I had the, I had a credit card, like its expiration came up. And so all the [00:13:00] places have been emailing me, Hey, do you have a new credit card? What’s your new expiration date? That sort of thing. And it’s, so it’s actually been a blessing in disguise, more than a hassle because I realized how much stuff I’m paying for that I don’t actually need to pay for.

So I started off with Link tree. Link Tree would be $99 a month. And I was like, surely. Surely I can replicate a link tree. So I just sent the, the address for my current link tree. Um, I showed it to Claude and he’s like, I can code that. So he coded it all up, but then what’s great is he put that all the information for that link tree.

Because I have it where he can talk to Shopify and we’re gonna get to Shopify in a second. He attached it. So now I have cassie alexander.com/links, so that will be my new link tree when I roll it out to all of my bios. But because he has a list of everything that is in that link tree in Supabase, if I say, you know what?

We’re gonna do a Valentine’s Day sale. He can go in there and he can swap out what I want to have be on sale up at the top of [00:14:00] my faux link tree that he’s created for me, and I don’t have to do it myself. Like there’s so much, you know, they say you pay in money or you pay in time, and so much of authorship is just literally paying in time because there’s so much stuff to keep track of and to do if you want to play the game to its fullest, and most of us can’t because, we’re mortal. So then after that I was like, okay, what else am I paying for? And then I had started up a Calendly because I wanted to like get into some more consulting. And I was like, I don’t wanna pay for Calendly. How do we do that? And that was a matter of an evening.

So now if you go to cassiealexander.com/calendar, it’s attached. We just had to jump through a couple hoops on the back end, but it now talks to, Google Meet account, it talks to my calendar and it talks to my Stripe so I can accept payments and it’s got a little calendar there no problem.

And now that’s just mine for forever. I don’t have to pay anybody for it. So then I went on to Shopify and I started looking at all the apps that I’m paying for, which I refuse to pay for now. So, um, on, [00:15:00] you have to get an API key for your Shopify store, but this should be the big reason that there’s no reason for somebody to not have a direct sales store anymore if they would like to.

Because if you understand how AI works, it can literally just set it up for you. AI and Shopify go together like peanut butter and jelly. They are so happy to talk to each other. So, um, so I got the A API key for Shopify. And, uh, my Rewind app was like, I was paying them $30 a month. And what they did is they created like a backup of my store every week, which is like, what am I actually paying for here?

Come on. So I was like, can we do this? And Claude was like, I got you, boo. So he, he went and like, hoovered up all the stuff from my store, put it up into Supabase and then, um, and then set up Cron job. So now once a month, it’s gonna like back up my entire Shopify store for me. So I canceled Rewind.

I don’t need that anymore. Um, and then, um, uh, then I was like, what other big [00:16:00] expenses do I have? And the biggest expense that I had, the biggest recurring expense was my Omnisend and my Klaviyo subscriptions because I had a newsletter that was just like newsletter people. And then I had Klaviyo, which was like the direct sales people.

For people who don’t know, Omnisend is like a fancier version of MailerLite or MailChimp, so you can do this with any newsletter. Klaviyo is like the industry standard for doing post shopping flows for people. So if you ever are on a website and somebody, like, you look at an at something, but you don’t buy it.

But then like 30 minutes later it sends you an abandoned cart kind of message like, we saw you peeping our stuff, come back and buy it. That was a Klaviyo flow most likely. So I was like, we gotta be able to do this, ’cause mama didn’t wanna pay 400 bucks a month for this trash anymore. So I exported all, and I mean all, like all of my newsletter subscribers back in January just in a fit of peak because I was already like, this sucks.

I’m gonna do something about this. And then I didn’t do anything about it till like two weeks ago and now it’s [00:17:00] great. So I exported all of them and they maintained all of their tags. ’cause I have some international mailing lists. The tags all came with it. Although, the beauty of all these things that I’m telling you to do is none of them require that you turn off something and then turn the AI on.

So you can always see if you can manage it yourself first successfully. And then once you feel confident, you can cancel the subscription or whatever. So don’t, so don’t feel like you’ve gotta like, make this work or have this gap between like newsletter functionality. You don’t have to be like me and turn things off.

’cause you get mad at them. You can leave it running until you’re sure the new thing will work. But, and that, that was when I was uploading like 1300 newsletter subscribers to to my Supabase. I was like, do we need a new project? And Claude was like, no, you don’t, because it’s even better that we’re all in here so we can see all the data altogether.

And then that’s when I realized how much I’ve been getting ripped off this whole time because I know everybody out there. I it [00:18:00] actually boils my blood because I know so many authors in the past who have not been able to maintain a newsletter for themselves, even though that’s so important to do because it costs money, and especially when you’re starting off and you’re like, oh, there’s not that many people interested in my stuff.

I don’t really need this. I can’t really afford it until it becomes useful. You’re caught in this gap between like, it’s not, it’s not useful yet, but it won’t become useful unless you can pay for it until it becomes useful, you know? So it turns out that in actuality so I was paying like 200 bucks each to those.

So $400 each to those for like 1300 people total, I’m sorry, 13,000 people total. Let me get all the zeros there. When I’m done warming up my new newsletter list to email 13,000 people will cost me a buck thirty. Do you realize how badly we have been getting ripped off by newsletter providers literally this entire time?

I’m just like, the gall, the gall.

Steph Pajonas: I’m with you on this one. I’m gonna, I’m gonna come in [00:19:00] here and say I’m with you on this one. Because I like 10 years ago, 10 years ago, it was just like, this is way too much money for what I’m getting out of this. I cannot believe that I have to pay, 30, 40, $50 a month for these newsletter subscriptions when I can probably build something myself. And believe it or not I did, I like, I got some…

Cassie Alexander: That’s awesome.

Steph Pajonas: WordPress, I got some WordPress plugins to talk to each other, do other things, and then hook into AWS for simple email service, their SES and just use that for sending emails because yeah, I’m with you.

Like there are a lot of companies now who aren’t. They’re just so bloated. They are so bloated, like they have so many employees that they have to pay salaries on and whatnot. And then so you end up as the end customer paying these exorbitant rates for something that is so cheap if you just do it yourself.

Clapping applause for you for getting that done.

Cassie Alexander: I, yeah. I was just [00:20:00] like, I was so mad and then I then, because I was talking to Claude about it and I was like, okay, so I don’t need a separate project. This isn’t a heavy burden because MailerLite, when you hit each, cap or whatever, you’re like, oh, I must be paying for something important.

And Claude is like, does it cost more to open up a longer spreadsheet than a shorter spreadsheet? And I was like, motherfucker, it doesn’t, I was so mad then. But you’re right.

So I…

Danica Favorite: I love this because yes, like this has been my trauma as an author. Like I, I had MailChimp back in the day when it was free.

And then they said, oh, now that we’ve been in business for a while here, pay some extra money to keep what you’ve got. And I’m like, okay. And then to the point where they like made it so expensive that I was like, holy crap, MailChimp is now one of the most expensive email providers. So then I moved everything, the MailerLite and then MailerLite did the same thing.

And I, I love this point that no. A longer spreadsheet does not cost more [00:21:00] money. I think that needs to be like the author slogan. A longer spreadsheet does not cost more money.

Cassie Alexander: For reals? No, for reals. And so, so I already had an AWS account, but that’s not hard to do. Just get one, it’s fine. And then I did the simple email service like you, Steph, and then you do have to hop around and do some deMARK stuff.

But any AI can talk you through that. It, my, my, Claude is like, where do you host your stuff? Is it GoDaddy, Name Cheap or whatever. And I was like, I’m on so and and he is like, great, click here, and here and type in this, and this. And then boom, it was done and I was just like, this is insane.

I do have to warm up my list, ’cause I just went through this change about two weeks ago. But because I had already been sending emails from my cassie@cassiealexander.com email address I already had like my domain warmed up, so that is fine. So it shouldn’t be a big deal. But what was beautiful is because he’s got all my newsletter subscribers in Supabase, he’s like, here’s how we’re gonna do that, totally [00:22:00] talked me through it. It’s like we’re going email like this first email to your most engaged subscribers who are most likely to email you back and we’re gonna ask them a question and then we’re gonna embigin the circle just again and again and again until you’re finally sending to everybody all of the time.

And I was like, this is genius. And then what’s even better Danica though, because Claude knows from my Shopify store what my brand is and what my vibe is. And we were sending test emails back and forth and he was just nailing my vibe because he has access to like all the fonts that he, that are free to use.

He can use all the background colors. So when I did finally start warming things up recently. I just pointed him to a folder that had the graphics I wanted him to use in it. And I was like, okay, create a warmup email, send me the test one. And he totally did. And then, and then last week when I was showing this off on Novae and I substack, I was like, okay, everybody who’s here, gimme your email addresses.

And then I just grabbed all their email addresses and then I gave them to Claude and I was like, okay. Email all these people, but make it like unicorn themed. And it is totally like unicorn themed. Everything’s in [00:23:00] pastel, it’s like a unicorn emoji. It’s so easy. So then I don’t have to sit there and like drag and drop the little boxes over anymore.

Like, I feel like now I’m gonna be so much more communicative on my newsletter. Because it won’t be such a pain in the ass to freaking do you know? I need to go through and you do have to consider some things when you do that. Like the CAN-SPAM Act means that you do still have to have a footer in your email that has like an appropriate address for your country or whatever that you have.

And then you have to have a way for people to unsubscribe. So we had to make a cassiealexander.com/unsubscribe page, no big deal. And then, and then you have to keep track of your unsubscribes. And so that, that information has to live in the Supabase Um, which is, which is fine. ’cause again, it’s like a spreadsheet, who cares?

And and yeah, though, but it’s just it just feels like magic. And, and so, um, some of the crazier stuff too. It’s like, so now that I can have it interact with my Shopify store, I actually haven’t even had it touch my existing [00:24:00] Shopify store, although I do wanna update some things. But what I’ve, what’s always been in the hopper for me to do in my head has been to make stores for each of the languages that I’ve translated in.

I’m big into AI translations now, but prior to that, coming on the scene, I had paid, for a lot of human translations and I’ve just never had the willpower to sit there and do cassiealexander.com/french you know, or German or whatever language. And so now I can just say, let’s do this. And it can just happen.

And then I don’t, I need, I don’t need to supervise it wildly. I can just look at the end result and be like, oh, touch this up here and that there and it will be done. So I’m so hyped about that. And, and that’s the thing is I think people get maybe scared or bogged down in the start of this process.

Or like when you get into the gutty works of Facebook or the Amazon SES and stuff, or Shopify API Keys. You’re like, oh, this is arcane and scary. But like on the other side of it though, is fricking magic because then you can just say, here’s [00:25:00] what I would like to have done, and it fucking happens.

And then you don’t have to, you don’t have to be the intercessor who sits there and pulls over the text box into your MailChimp newsletter, and then types into it. And then maybe it gets lost or for whatever reason, where you don’t have to sit there and figure out the perfect font color, it’s just so much easier.

So much easier. So, um, and, and, um, and just to hammer this point home even further, ’cause I’m crazy. I, so I had a nonfiction book come out last week that I haven’t really talked about all that much. I’ve been talking more about the automation behind the scenes of getting it out everywhere.

Danica Favorite: Please talk about this nonfiction book, because I know I’ve been looking forward to it and for whatever reason I missed that it came out.

So please hammer home that this book is out because it’s so cool.

Cassie Alexander: Thank you. It’s called How to Think with AI and it is less, it’s like Leverage For The Rest of Us is the subtitle and it’s less of a nonfiction book and more of just a manifesto about like how to use AI [00:26:00] and it’s not model locked.

It’s more, it’s very agnostic. It’s about like, here’s how AIs think, and how if you interact with them in these sorts of ways, if you understand the balance that they have between when they have to tell the truth and when they have to use their imagination, which is technically a lie, but it’s actually a good thing because if they can’t use their imagination, they can’t make marketing materials for you.

And the difference between systems and data, it’s more like how do you, how can you relate to your AI better so that you can help it help you help it and get into that lovely flow state where the magic really happens and you actually find it to be like a flywheel and a force multiplier. So, um, so yeah, so I translated How to Think With AI into 49 other languages. Bringing me up to 50 total because I am insane, but because I had my translation machine that, yeah. So I was just like why stop at 28, which is the max I’m doing for fiction, let’s just go all in. ‘Cause 50 sounds like a great number. So we added like Swahili and Urdu and Farsi and just all these languages just [00:27:00] ’cause, and also too the book is short.

So I was like, I can spend this here and just see what’ll happen. Because of that though I’ve had to have all these interesting thought processes though about automating, getting that fleet of books out into the world. How can I do that and how can I prep those books to go out into the world?

So I showed I think Claude or GPT Codex ’cause I do use GPT Codex a lot. He’s a really great coding beast and, and I should hop back too and say, I very frequently assign them both the same folder to look at. And they don’t look at it at the same time, but I have them check each other’s code. So if I’m ever getting nervous about where I’m going or what, like the end result might be, I, I stop code like Claude code and then I hop over to GPT Codex and I’m like, can you look at this and make sure that everything is, looks copacetic. And that also too, that there is nothing here that will fail silently because failing silently means that you’re just not gonna know that it’s got an error. That’s for like more upper level coding stuff though. But I fed one of them, actually, it was GPT Codex. I fed [00:28:00] him an, uh, EPUB that I liked. Actually, I think it was my Vellum EPUB for the English version of the book, which I had to do in a rush. Uh, to get it up before my pre-order thing got me in trouble. And, and I was like, can we just do this? And he was like, yes. That’s so easy.

Duh. And so he, we created all the EPUBs for the other 49 languages that there were. And which is insane. And then all the PDFs for the other 49 languages that there were. And I had purposely left space on my cover for there to be like the localized translation of the How to Think With AI, Leverage for the Rest of Us on the cover.

So we did all the ebook covers and then we did, um, then I had him go and research, where we would be allowed to put up PDFs of the book. So we went and did a version of the covers that would work for all the places we can put it up on KDP because KDP has its own like spine regulations and it’s a rather thin book, [00:29:00] but then Ingram Spark has different spine regulations.

And so he did a lovely job of kind of mirroring the front and the back and then putting in my translated blurbs and doing all of the different PDFs for all of those. So now I’m sitting on just like a treasure trove of stuff. It’s what I’ve got going over here on my other two machines is ’cause I have three Claude Max subscriptions, don’t tell anyone.

Um, I have one going through Bowker’s that is registering all of my ISBNs for me. And then I have another going currently right now it’s doing Amazon attribution links for me because I wanted Amazon attribution links to run all my Facebook ads here coming up. But, it was doing Kobo uploads.

So I uploaded my book to Kobo in all 50 languages. I uploaded it to Google Play in all 50 languages. And all I had to do was like develop a Claude skill for that to happen. So you basically approach your chat and you’re like, Hey, Claude, I wanna create a skill. [00:30:00] And a skill is like a worksheet that is gonna be something short and memorable.

And memorable for it, that it will be, it will have repeated access and anybody can make a skill. I see people out there selling skills and I’m like, oh, this kind of feels skeezy to me because like if so you can just talk to your Claude and make a skill that’s bespoke for you. I don’t know. It feels weird to like sell them to other people, maybe to give them away like trading cards.

But, so I have a Bowker skill now. I have a Kobo skill. I’ve Draft2Digital skill, a Google Play skill, and basically you just sit there and you watch them click around on the web. Site and you all, you figure out with them what they need to do and then they, um, go through and perform that skill for you repeatedly until they run out of the information. And because all of the information from my blurbs, my translations, cover, book covers um, are, uh, the, the eBooks and the PDFs are in a folder on my machine, but the titles and the blurbs are in Supabase. And the [00:31:00] IBNs, they put them into Supabase as they’re assigned so I can keep track of them. So, um. So, yeah, so basically I’ve been wash, rinse, repeating all of that.

So today when I finish this call with you, I’m gonna crack Ingram Spark so that I can upload all of my print PDFs and have this book out there in all the language as possible there too. Will anybody buy it in Urdu? Probably not, but I just wanted to see if I could do it. And I, and so far all signs point to yes.

And then once I’m done with this grand experiment with my nonfiction, I’ll start doing my own fiction more aggressively in the languages that I think I actually might make some money in. But anybody can do this. I know I sound like a weirdo.

Steph Pajonas: I’m seriously blown away. I love this this total like hack of getting Claude skills to like do all of this grunt work for you because it is, it’s totally grunt work. I’m currently doing it by hand for Future Fiction Press, and I now I’m over here thinking this is [00:32:00] what I need to be doing.

Cassie Alexander: Oh, I’ll send I’ll send you my skills stuff. No, for reals.

Steph Pajonas: Send me your skills.

Send me your skills because I, because this is a lot of grunt work for authors like even, even just launching one book, if you’re wide, it’s put everything on Amazon. That’s cutting and pasting keywords and blurbs, and then uploading and then checking, and then you know, then filling out all of the things for all of your prices and all the different regions, and then you have to do that on Draft2Digital maybe. You’re doing it on Kobo, you’re doing it on Google Play. Google Play is always just like I hate doing pricing on Google Play, so freaking much, so much. But if I had a skill that could just go do those things for me, awesome. These are all the places that we can be saving time, which in turn saves us money because really my time is worth something. My time is worth a lot at this point, and for me to go and be doing drudgery work, I’m just like, oh, this is something I need to farm out [00:33:00] to something else. And AI is there for you.

Cassie Alexander: Yeah, for reals. Like, so much so, and yeah, ’cause I used to be wide and then I pulled a bunch of things back into KU.

But yeah, it was just, it was so much work with so little, just, yeah, just so much mental effort and yeah, I’m just all about that automated lifestyle. If this is like, if any activity is an activity I’m gonna have to do more than three times in my author career, I’m figuring out a way to outsource it because it, there’s, it’s, there’s no harm in doing that. And it does it totally fine. Once you’ve trained it, it, Claude’s had some, um, ’cause I’m using Claude for the actual interaction with the rest of the browser because GPT Codex can’t get there directly. Only Claude right now can interact with the browser for you, but it, yeah, so he has to sit there sometimes and figure out different ways to get into the different blanks that he needs to get to and is apparently janky AF. So we have to use like a coordinated, like a [00:34:00] coordination thing where I, when I size the screen one way and I can’t touch it because he knows where the coordinates are to like upload the covers and stuff.

But everything is surmountable. So far the only thing. I haven’t tried Amazon legit yet. I’m a little nervous about my real Amazon account, but my Amazon attribution thing has been going fine. It like finished just a little bit ago. And now I have 1300 attribution links. It was like, do you just wanna do 10?

And I was like, no, let’s just do this and have them done for life. And then you can put them in Supabase and then my Facebook machine can touch them for forever. And then I never have to think about these stupid CSVs full of these really long, complicated things ever again.

Steph Pajonas: Speaking of Amazon, have you gotten it to do Amazon ads?

Cassie Alexander: No, but I’m interested in that. So one of the first projects I had was creating a keyword drill rig. Because it is ridiculously easy to use proxies to query Amazon to get information from it. And I have 12,000, [00:35:00] yeah, I have too many keywords now. I was just like, just keep running for days.

See how many keywords you can find. Woo hoo. So yes, I’m curious about using those for Amazon ads because like I’ve never done my own Amazon, oh, I have, but I haven’t done them successfully, let’s say. But with Amazon ads, there’s that method of thinking where you start off with an auto ad and then you let it run, possibly at a loss for like two to four weeks.

It populates the search terms that might possibly be useful for you to actually do things with. But this way, because, how are you gonna know what keywords people are actually searching for on there? Now I do know because it does the, um, my, my system. And this is one of the things too, is like you have to have this intelligence to ask your system.

Is there a way we can be doing, and this is in my book too, that we could do, be doing this better or smarter or smoother or like easier like, you know, leave room, make this questions very open-ended about what other things can we do here? How else should we be thinking [00:36:00] about this that might be profitable to me in my career?

And so we are just doing, kind of making our own like, figuring out where the blue water is in regards to keywords based on a ratio between search interest like keyword interest. And because it’s able to tell how how many people are clicking on a search keyword in Amazon and then what books come up under it.

So if somebody is like doing a search for romantasy, obviously that’s like a great keyword. So many people are hitting it. But when you go to ACOTAR, it’s got probably like 70,000 reviews or something. And so that’s not like a great keyword for you to use because there’s, there’s so much competition for that slot, it’s pointless. So your job is with the keywords to find the delta between the keyword that they have a high search volume, but low competition as figured out by the fact that the books that are coming up with that keyword don’t have that many reviews yet, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad books. It just means that they, that keyword hasn’t been exploited to its fullest. And then if you wanna get super [00:37:00] crazy, I know, I haven’t done this yet and I probab, I dunno. I was gonna say I probably won’t, but I should just never say that where AI is concerned, um, there’s also two places you can pay for API access that will let you use their information on Amazon.

So you can just hammer that instead of slowly crawling over Amazon for days on end like I have done. Or there’s a couple different places called like kipa and stuff where you can do like your own reverse ASIN searches to figure out if you put in an ASIN what keywords are definitely coming up for it.

So yeah. Sorry, I will talk about this stuff at a drop of a hat Steph. I just like, would you like me to be a big nerd on your show? Yes.

Steph Pajonas: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Danica Favorite: We are here for the big nerds. ‘Cause I think that this is some of the stuff that people are like, okay, but really how? What’s all this?

You explain it really well, particularly [00:38:00] at a lower level, but also a high level. So I think this is something that people at all ranges of knowledge are gonna be able to access. So I really appreciate that. So nerd on.

Cassie Alexander: Yeah, well what, what I want is so I wanna view my career as almost like this living organism that kind of flows.

So I wanna be able to, at some point in time, to be able to be like, okay, because I would love to get back to writing. This has all been thrilling. But once it’s all set, I would like to get back to writing in a big way, but I wanna be able to write a book. I want it to be translated into all these languages.

I want it to be posted automatically to all the places those languages can be posted in ebook and paperback, and I want to know when I post it, what keywords are gonna be the best for it. So when I start social medias and all of those things that I can manipulate using those keywords so that like they happen to be in my blurb in all of the languages.

That was the other thing with the keyword drill, was discovering that there’s keywords like on in Japanese there that I would never know, you know, but I am publishing books in Japanese now and so it’s awful where like, how would I ever even begin to know, [00:39:00] you know, like even when I publish stuff in German, I’m just winging it.

And that’s that sad, so the keyword drill actually gives me a lot of visibility into other languages for keywords too. Um, and so, so that I can have this whole fluid system that’s just like supporting me underneath my career and my dreams and my hopes and my goals, and it’s not. And then I have something that sends out, newsletters to all of the languages that I’ve got.

Oh, that’s what I was gonna mention earlier is, if you go to cassiealexander.com/newsletter, I just started up newsletters for all 28 of the languages that I’m going to be publishing my fiction in. Because why not? And because it’s gonna be so low friction for me to now send out newsletters. And because with those particular languages, I will be publishing like the same books in all 20 at the same time.

They don’t have to be like, German has three books and then the other one has four books. It’s gonna be like, everything is everything. Here we go. So it’s no sweat off my back to multiply that out [00:40:00] times 28 and just say, all right, Claude, this is, I wanna send out a newsletter to the whole fleet.

That’s what we’ve been calling it on my side with my AI the fleet. And it can do that for me. And, and so, so, yeah. So yeah, when people say they don’t know what they would use AI for, I’m just like, I wanna use it for everything. And then I want everything to talk to itself so that it’s handling all of my shit for me.

And then I can just be like the person who drops by every three months and is here’s my next release. And make it happen. Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: That’s a, that’s what I want AI to be there for. I want it to be there to be my assistant, be my cheerleader, be the thing that is doing a lot of this grunt work that I don’t need to be doing, and I wanna be the person with the ideas, and the cool stories and that sort of thing, and I just wanna show up with that and then have it take over from there.

Danica Favorite: Exactly. I think that’s the thing people don’t really understand is, oh, the AI’s gonna take over all the things, but that’s the part [00:41:00] that I love, is it’s doing the stuff I don’t wanna do, I don’t like to do.

I just was saying in the opening, I started dictating a couple new books, ’cause I’m crazy, but ultimately I want to get to a place and I’m working on this of having that workflow where, okay, boom I’ve dictated all these chapters, all this stuff. And now I have the book because that’s the part I like.

I like going for a drive and just talking to my phone and getting whatever I want, and we just keep getting closer with all these different automations and things that are coming up with. So yeah I’m totally here for that. And I know some people are really negative about the fact that the AI sometimes can be just a yes person.

Guess what? I need that. I want someone to be my cheerleader. And if I do want someone to be critical, I can ask the AI to be critical and it will, so it can be what you tell it to be [00:42:00] and you’re giving us some really cool ideas of other things that can tell us.

Cassie Alexander: It’s so funny because, there’s that sentiment out there.

It’s I want an AI to be my dishwasher, whatever. I don’t want it to create, to replace my creative process, and I’m like, a hundred percent. But so much of being an author, the act of being an author is essentially like laborious, dumb shit. Like posting on all the places, doing all the keyword research, making sure that your blurb is like good for whatever version of good Amazon likes right now.

Especially too, it seems to me this is what I’ve been intuiting from the ether, and so don’t take it as gospel. It’s not like I have an inside line to anything except that I pay attention to a lot of places, but. As we move into a future where it’s gonna become more important to refresh your stuff so that AIs crawl over it more so that you seem like a more recent data point.

It’s gonna be even harder for people who are hard line AI or trad pub to keep up because I can envision a future where we [00:43:00] don’t, I know I haven’t changed blurbs on many of my books since they came out years ago, and it’s just ’cause it hasn’t been on my priority list. But I think if I ever want those books to surface and searches, I’m going to need to make changes to those websites, and to those blurbs on Amazon or whatever, more frequently and the, and so if people are like I’m not gonna have a book come out till next year. I don’t need to do all this. And it’s like, yes, but your visibility and your rank are gonna, unless you’re a very aggressive marketer, probably gonna slowly dwindle through no fault of your own, just because you will have fallen off of the AI’s web crawler’s mental plate. And so to have the ability to refresh your blurbs in an effective way, and also to your website in an effective way so that you stay top of mind to all the places you want to sell out there, you’re gonna need to probably automate some of that stuff, or you’re gonna have to dedicate a lot of time to it.

I recently took a Coral Hart class and she was saying, this is part of the reason too, I was like, man, I gotta automate shit because she’s obviously super genius at what she does, but she was saying that she [00:44:00] updates all of her back matter every three months, and I was like, damn, that sounds like something I would wanna have something else do for me.

But that’s another way of freshening up your files too, so that seems like they’re more interesting to the AIs that are gonna rule the algorithm here in the future. And so that’s just like another thing that I think people don’t think about when they wanna want push back on this is like there’s gonna be not only, there, there’s gonna be more grunt work in the future, not less for authors to do.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. And I agree with that because I have been, this is something I’ve been teaching a lot when I teach, like my blurb classes and metadata stuff. Even like the stuff that we do through Publish Drive with that is that, that and I tell people this, I know that we’ve been taught as authors to tell people that you’re trying to make the book as attractive as possible for a reader to buy. At this point, your blurbs and your metadata, it is to make it as attractive as possible for the bots. And so you have to make that something that the [00:45:00] bots want because or, and the bots are looking for, and the bots are serving to the readers because it isn’t just the readers anymore, it’s the bots serving the readers. And you’ve gotta create that.

And to your point, I updated the metadata on one of my really old series, that’s 10 years ago, just that metadata refresh totally increased my sales on that book and I was like, oh crap. Yep, this works. So all the stuff that you’re saying, oh, it’s in the ether. No, it’s true. So yeah, like absolutely. As we’re getting ready to wrap up here, ’cause I know we could do this for another five or six hours probably.

Any final thoughts or final pieces of advice before I know Steph does her little wrap up questions.

Cassie Alexander: Yeah, no, I just, this is my favorite thing to talk about. So like I’m, and I’m very approachable and I’m very nice. I know the last time I was here I was agro, but that was an agro topic.

Hopefully this one has been the nice podcast version of Cassie. I think we’ve only cussed five times [00:46:00] and it’s been totally appropriate. But if you, the, the book that I did come out with, it’s called How to Think With AI, it’s by Cassandra Alexander. That’s my nonfic name. Leverage for the Rest of Us is the subtitle.

And I really mean that ’cause I wish everybody the best on their AI using journey. And that’s what I that’s why I put it out there. And part of why I did it in 50 languages is ’cause if it does help somebody in Urdu or Swahili or any other language, that, that’s amazing because I feel like this is like the biggest opportunity, the most democratizing opportunity we will have ever had, technology wise ever in our lifetimes for sure. And then I do a sub. I have a Substack with Novae Caelum, and that is AI marketing for storytellers. And we are also gonna start doing classes not where we sell finished products, but where we teach people how to make the things that we are making.

So I think that website, it should be live by the time this podcast is live. And that will be AImarketingforstorytellers.com, if you wanna [00:47:00] see what we’ve got in the offering. We’re still kinda debating on who wants to teach what ’cause it’s also fun.

Steph Pajonas: Because it’s also fun. I’m right there with you. I also love, love seeing people fight over topics at the FFA as well, and they’re like, oh, I wanna teach that.

I wanna teach that because it is so much fun. It’s so much fun. Excellent. You answered all of my questions ’cause I usually ask about URLs at the end of the podcast to send people to. But I’m gonna make sure that we link to your new book. I’ll make sure we link to your classes and your website.

And I definitely believe it or not, wanna have you back and talk more about automations. We’ll give you some time to come up with some more.

Cassie Alexander: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: And then we’ll get you back on here.

Cassie Alexander: Yeah. Lemme see how my translations do. Everybody’s like, I would like to do translations for you. It’s you gotta gimme six weeks to make sure that I’m not huffing my own paint.

I I don’t think I am, I think I’m as good as I could possibly be within the constraints of the current models. But that still could be paint puffery. So let me get my own stuff out there. So if I embarrass myself, it’s only me embarrassing me, and I will have just learned things. Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: Great. [00:48:00] We’ll check in with you after they’ve been live for a little while, and we’ll see how they do.

We’ll see if you sell any in Urdu. All right. Thank you so much for being here. It’s always awesome to talk with you. I’m so glad we got to a chance to do this again. Danica, do you wanna bring us out here?

Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah. The cool thing is Cassie just mentioned Novae. They are our next our next interview actually.

Cassie Alexander: Oh awesome.

Steph Pajonas: Yes, yes. So,

Danica Favorite: mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m really excited to talk to yeah, I just lost my train of thought.

Cassie Alexander: Oh. He’s doing such amazing stuff with audio visual stuff. I’m just, he blows my mind every day. Yeah.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yes.

Steph Pajonas: I’m looking forward to that.

Danica Favorite: I’m just, yeah I really I feel like this is another one where when he comes on, it’s just gonna be like hi can you come back for like 10 more episodes?

But that is a really good reminder because Cassie and Novae, they on their substack often do a lot of live [00:49:00] videos, a lot of live teaching, um, and so please go check that out because you will learn so much from them. And it is cute to hear how the two of you fight over who’s gonna get to teach what, because both of you are just so smart and have so many good pieces of information to share.

So definitely check that out. Make sure you come back next week to listen to Novae and then if you didn’t hear Cassie’s previous one, make sure you go listen to that ’cause it’s awesome. And yeah. So finally, just make sure you’re liking and subscribing to all the cool stuff. Brave New Bookshelf on YouTube.

Listen to it on your podcast. Do try to get those YouTubes in because one of the things we talked about when we were first talking to Cassie is that she’s got, a lot of good screen shares that she was gonna do for us today. And since most of our listeners do it by audio, we’re like maybe not.

If we have more people watching on YouTube, [00:50:00] then we can say, yes, please give us the screen shares. Because I really wanted to see them. Not gonna lie, I was the screen share greedy lady. And then just remember, like and subscribe to Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press and Publish Drive all over the social media land so that you can hear about all the great stuff everyone is doing.

Steph Pajonas: All that great stuff. Yes. And drop by bravenewbookshelf.com to check out the show notes. Sign up for our newsletter to get those show notes into your inbox the next day after the podcast goes live.

And then make it easy on yourself. You can just get those notes straight to your inbox, all right. Again, thank you Cassie. Thank you so much for being here. Everybody thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you guys in the next one. Okay. Bye.

Danica Favorite: Bye.

Speaker 2: 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 [00:51:00] notes.

Episode 77 – Vibe Coding and Custom Author Tools with Cassie Alexander