Ahoy, mateys! 🏴‍☠️

We weighed anchor. Advanced Cowork for Writers is officially open, and the first lessons are live in the learning portal.

Intro built the ship. Advanced sails the fleet.

But Kim, I’m still catching up on Intro! How am I supposed to sail a whole fleet?

Lean in close, because this is the part I’m proudest of: this course is built for people who don’t have seven spare hours. You can take it at Deckhand speed, and that’s a perfectly respectable way to sail.

👋 Welcome Aboard: You Are Still the Secret Sauce

The opening lessons are short and set the heading for the whole voyage.

The big idea is the One Author Crew:

• 🧑‍✈️ You’re the captain. You’re at the helm, setting the heading and making every call that matters. AI is not replacing you. Human in the loop, always.

• 🤖 Your AI crew stands watch. In shifts, like a real ship, so the captain can actually sleep. Because we are not robots. We need rest. Claudeykins doesn’t.

• ⛵ Every pen name is a ship. Each one gets its own quartermaster, a pen name secretary that keeps the log and answers to you.

In Intro, Claude helped you with a task. In Advanced, a team of AIs runs pieces of your business while you steer. That’s the shift, from single tools to systems.

🗺️ The Chart for This Voyage

No spoilers, but here’s where we’re headed:

• 🎛️ At the Helm: Claude drives your other software. Photo editors, slide decks, video editors. You don’t need to master every app anymore. You know what you want, and the AI knows the buttons.

• 🗺️ The Chart Room: your command center, built to fit your business and your personality. Mine runs on Supabase, Notion, and Obsidian, but yours doesn’t have to. We build it so it can change with the tides. No Castles in the Sand.

• ⛵ The Fleet: pen name secretaries in action.

• 🤖 All Hands: onboarding AIs from other ports. My crew includes Muse on socials, Grok Bot, Hermes, Codex, and Antigravity, because I wanted to know if my system could handle all of them. (It can. 🙌)

• ⬆️ Level Up: pipelines that work while you sleep.

• 💰 The Treasure Chest: the resources, the goodies, and yes, the Ginsus. 🔪

🧹 Three Ways Through

I heard you on Intro. Seven hours was a LOT, and some of you are still working through it (no judgment, I did a deep dive on everything!). So this time every project opens with a Captain’s Log, a short TLDR lesson with the big idea and one small task to do. Then pick your path:

• 🧹 Deckhand: watch each Captain’s Log and carry out your orders. You finish with a working crew.

• 🧭 First Mate: build alongside me in the main demo of each project.

• 🏴‍☠️ Captain: take every deep dive, because you want to know how and why. (That’s me. I’m the captain type.)

If you’re busy, be a Deckhand. Come back for the deep dives later. That’s exactly why I built it this way.

🤖 The Crew Built This One

Here’s my favorite part. The crew is producing the course about the crew.

• Fabio (Claude) edited the Welcome Aboard video: cut the long pauses, the ums and the restarts, leveled my too-quiet webcam mic, warmed up the tinny sound, and made the captions and transcript. Then he turned the whole workflow into a reusable skill.

• The slides? Built by Claudeykins right inside the thread where we were planning the lesson, then presented straight from there. I even recorded him building them. Very meta. Very Ink & Code! 🤖

• Chatty (ChatGPT) painted the parchment and the pirate captain.

Doing the thing to teach the thing. That’s very Ink & Code. 🎉

And because there is ALWAYS a sea shanty: The One Author Crew Shanty is waiting as a bonus lesson in the Welcome section. Claude wrote the prompt, Suno wrote the lyrics, and I edited them. 🎶

🎓 Climb Aboard

Paid members sail free. Advanced Cowork is included with your paid membership, every lesson as it drops. If you already have Intro to Cowork, you’re already enrolled. Just log in!

^👇 IF YOU DON’T: LINK & HOW TO BELOW THE PAYWALL^👇

Not a paid member yet? Subscribe here and come join us in the private Discord.

Founding Members, you’re already aboard. Advanced Cowork is part of your all-access pass, along with every other course in the school.

Rather own the course outright? Advanced Cowork for Writers is at its early-bird price in the store for $299 while the course is being built. When the last lesson drops, the price goes up to $399.

This is AI-assisted teaching, folks, not slop. Every lesson is me at the helm, every workflow is one I run in my real publishing business, and every judgment call stays human. The crew just hauls the rope.

See you on deck, mateys! ⚓

~ Kim ♥

P.S. Yes, the shanty is stuck in my head too. You’re welcome. 🦜

🤖 AI Credits: Course art by Chatty (ChatGPT). Video editing, slides, and drafting assist by First Mate Fabio (Claude). The One Author Crew Shanty by Suno, from a Claude prompt, lyrics edited by me. Editing and pirate talk by me. Yarrr. 🏴‍☠️

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Ahoy, mateys! 🏴‍☠️

Last week we brought Intro to Cowork for Writers into port. Seven hours, forty-one lessons, four projects, real books formatted, real scouts running, and a whole lot of robots.

So... where are we sailing next?

Next week, we weigh anchor. Advanced Cowork for Writers sets sail, and you’re invited aboard.

Intro built the ship. Advanced sails the fleet.

But Kim, I’m still figuring out my scheduled tasks. I’m not ready for “advanced.”

Fair! But here’s the secret: advanced doesn’t mean harder. It means bigger. Intro taught you to hand Claude one job at a time. Advanced is what happens when you’ve got a dozen jobs, a handful of pen names, and a family that would like to see you at the dinner table occasionally.

That’s when you need a crew.

⚓ The One Author Crew

Some of you remember my YouTube live back in March about running a publishing business as a one author crew. (There was a sea shanty. There is ALWAYS a sea shanty.) This course is that idea, built out for real:

• You’re the captain. At the helm, setting the heading, making every call that matters.

• Your AI crew stands watch. In shifts, like a real ship, so the captain can actually sleep.

• Every pen name is a ship in your fleet, each with its own quartermaster keeping the log.

Storytelling in a course for storytellers. I couldn’t help myself. 🦜

🗺️ The Voyage

Here’s the chart, no spoilers:

• At the Helm: Claude driving your other software. Photo editors, slide decks, even video editing. You steer, the AI drives.

• The Chart Room: your command center, whatever you build it in, plus the question nobody wants to answer: is your ship actually seaworthy?

• The Fleet: pen name secretaries that run each pen name on its own schedule, from every single day to “see you next month.”

• All Hands: your AI crew on watch. Ticket systems, doers and checkers, and working in parallel. (You are linear. The AI is not.)

• Level Up: pipelines that move everything forward one step while you sleep, and how to sign on crew from other ports. Because our systems need to be robust enough to grow and change with the shifting tides in our industry and in the Age of AI.

⏱️ A Shorter Voyage, Same Treasure

I heard you. Intro ran about seven hours, and you’re busy people. This one sails leaner.

Every project opens with a Captain’s Log: a short TLDR lesson with the big idea and the one thing to do. Watch that and you’re sailing. Head below decks for the deep dives and demos when you want the how.

🤖 The Crew Built This One

Here’s my favorite part. We’re using the course to build the course.

The images in this post? Claude color-corrected and optimized every one of them in LightCraft this morning while I drank my coffee. Twenty megabytes of pictures down to about three, and nobody looks jaundiced anymore. (I’ll be doing this on the rest of the articles here and the website soon.) The slides, the video edits, the lesson notes: the crew is running all of it, and you’ll watch it happen.

Doing the thing to teach the thing. Very meta. Very Ink & Code. 🎉

🎓 Paid Members Sail Free

Paid members get Advanced Cowork for Writers free, same as Intro. Every lesson as it drops, on the house. Your boarding pass is waiting below.

Not a paid member yet? Climb aboard here:

Subscribe now

🪙Early Birds Get the Doubloons

Rather own it outright? Advanced Cowork is at its early bird price of $299 in the store while the course is being built. When the last lesson drops, it goes to $399.

And Founding Members? You’re already aboard. Advanced Cowork is included in your membership, along with every other course in the school, every class and every update as it rolls out. If you want that all-access ticket for yourself, Founding Membership is $499 a year.

This is AI-assisted teaching, not slop. Every lesson is me at the helm, every workflow is one I run in my real publishing business, and every judgment call stays human. The crew just hauls the rope.

Monday, we sail. See you on deck, mateys! ⚓

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

P.S. If you hear a sea shanty playing in the first lesson, no you didn’t. 🎶

🤖 AI Credits: Flag by Chatty (ChatGPT), color-corrected and web-optimized by First Mate Fabio (Claude) driving LightCraft. Drafting assist by Fabio. Editing and pirate talk by me. Yarrr. 🏴‍☠️

Hey, my Ink & Codies! 👋

It is done. 🎓

(I feel like Frodo throwing the ring into Mount Doom 💍🌋)

The Final Thoughts lesson for Intro to Cowork for Writers just landed in the learning portal, which means every lesson, every demo, every project, every Ginsu is now sitting in your library. 41 lessons. Four hands-on projects. About 7 hours of me teaching. Course complete.

Which means you are not the same author you were when we started.

But Kim, I didn’t finish every project yet. I’m still catching up.

That’s fine. The portal doesn’t close. These lessons are yours, forever, grandfathered at the price you paid, no DRM, no subscription vanishing on you. (The point of the whole brand, really: your work and your tools should outlast any one platform. Castles in the Sand, folks. Only I’m building you a HOUSE.) Come back when life quiets down. The cowboys will still be there, waiting to get dressed. 🤠

But for the folks who DID come with me: look at what you have now. 👇

🏆 Four Projects, Four Superpowers (A Victory Lap)

Four projects, four pillars of a modern author business, four working systems in your hands:

Project 1: Scheduled Tasks + Marketing Skills. 🤖 You handed Claudeykins the calendar. The Story Trend Scout runs for you now, on schedule, without you lifting a finger. The three OpenAI alumni (Cover Trend Scout, Title Hook Crafter, Series Blueprint Architect) are files on your disk, forever, and no platform can take them back. Your market intelligence lands while you sleep. Know your market.

Project 2: Artifacts + Connectors. 📊 A chat answer is a conversation. An artifact is a possession. So you saw me build The Brass Ledger to study Steam Punk trends, and come up with a flight plan for my White King deadline (aka “The Damned Book” I’m trying to finish) on camera. I ran a BookBub post-mortem that showed me which four years of Featured Deals paid and which didn’t. If you have data, you now have dashboards. If you have goals, you now have scoreboards. See your numbers. A plan that updates beats a plan in a drawer.

Project 3: Drafting + Editing with Voice Profiles. 🦜 Your voice, codified onto a page an AI can hold. My Big Sky Country series drafted overnight: ~375,000 words in 24 hours, four books while I slept, each one leaving me a review file titled choices made in your absence. The continuity hounds corrected 133 of 163 chapters across the series in a single half-hour sweep, and the voice profile knew the difference between an error and a fingerprint. Protect your voice. The machine serves it. It never replaces it.

Project 4: Let’s Format Books! 📚🤠 Goodbye Vellum, goodbye Atticus. Proof copies on your Kindle before coffee. Chapter heading art you made yourself with Chatty and spliced with a Ginsu. A Book Formatter that interviews you once, locks every decision into a series theme, and then dresses the NEXT book in the series in five minutes. The cowboys got dressed, in all four formats. Ship your books.

And bookending it all: the orientation up front, the troubleshooting follow-ups (including the one where they moved the furniture mid-course 🪑), the travel-and-health secretary bonus (on my phone!), and a Final Thoughts graduation. 🎓

🧰 What’s in Your Toolbox Now

Count your Ginsus. 🔪 There are eleven, and they now live in the course as two tidy packs: a Skill Pack (installable .skill files, load them into Claude and go) and a Markdown Pack (readable .md versions you can run in any AI, or study and remake as your own):

• Story Trend Scout Builder (the scout that builds scouts)

• Story Trend Scout: Steampunk & Gaslamp (a finished example to study)

• Cover Trend Scout (OpenAI alumnus, now yours)

• Title Hook Crafter (OpenAI alumnus, now yours)

• Series Blueprint Architect (OpenAI alumnus, now yours)

• Voice DNA Extractor (your voice, captured)

• Story Mapper and Series Auditor (the continuity hounds)

• Proof Copy Maker (fast ePubs for your eReader)

• Book Formatter (the big one, with 65 bundled ornamental dividers)

• Sheet Splicer (turns AI art sheets into individual pieces)

Plus the take-home editions: a 96-page Class Notes collection (yes, we accidentally wrote a book) and the complete course transcript, both downloadable from the portal. Every one of these is a file you own on your disk. No subscription can take them away.

That’s rather the point.

🤖 This Was AI-Assisted, Not Slop (One Last Time)

Say it with me, because the whole brand lives here: this is AI-assisted work, folks, not slop.

Every lesson was me at the microphone. Every workflow is one I run in my real publishing business. Every judgment call stayed human. The AI did the busy work: a hundred small formatting decisions in the order I’d make them, 963 counted uses of one crutch phrase across five books, a bedtime proof-edit from my phone that landed on my iPad before I settled in to read.

And the rule I will say with my dying breath: nothing goes out naked. We do not let naked baby Claude run around in public. We dress him up before we unleash him on the unsuspecting world (aka HUMAN PROOFING BABY!) Give that boy some clothes! 👕👖👢

🚀 Where We Go Next: Advanced Cowork

Advanced Cowork for Writers picks up where this course leaves off and teaches the kind of workflows I run every day in my own publishing operation.

Pen-name secretaries that write your morning briefs. My take on command centers (with massive props to my dear friend Novae). An AI minion army with actual job descriptions. And the wild new frontier now upon us: AI driving your actual software.

I’m not just talking about remote control or Claude in Chrome, which we’ve had all year. We’ve turned a corner, and now writing tools and design suites are opening their doors to AI directly: Vellum opened a beta while I was literally teaching the formatting module, and Craft Apps just rolled out.

And we are going to drive all the things, my friends! 🏎️🏁🚥🏆💨

⏰ The Clocks

Clock One: 🚨 Intro to Cowork is complete and now sits at its full price of $299. If you enrolled during early access: congratulations, you called it, and you’re grandfathered forever. If you didn’t: $299 buys you about 7 hours of instruction, 41 lessons, eleven Ginsus, and a formatting system that replaces a software subscription all by itself.

Clock Two: Advanced Cowork for Writers is in early access right now at $299, and it goes to $399 at completion, same as this one did. You’ve now watched that movie once. You know how it ends.

Clock Three: Founding Membership now stands at $499/year and includes every course as it rolls out, every update, forever grandfathered at what you pay when you join. Founders who lock in their price early stay at that rate for as long as they subscribe. Full details on the membership page.

And paid Substack members, don’t forget: paid members get Intro to Cowork FREE. Grab it here. (Scroll down to “For My Paid Peeps.”)

💌 A Thank You

If you came with me from Module 1: thank you. You showed up for a course that was still being built. You watched me change my mind on camera. You watched them move the furniture on us TWICE and we kept teaching anyway. You fed back the questions that shaped the lessons.

You are the course, in a way I didn’t fully understand when I started it.

Thank you for being here. 💛

Come celebrate the finish line:

• Check out the learning portal at: learn.inkandcode.ai

• Visit the Store

• Become a Founding Member

• Join us in the Discord

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

P.S. The Automated Author is not a thing you buy. It’s a thing you ASSEMBLE. If you’ve been following along, you just finished assembling yours. Now go write something only you could write, and let the crew handle the mast. ☕🎓

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who built most of the Ginsus in your Downloads folder, drafted a cowboy series overnight, dressed a published series for the stores in a coffee refill, and left polite notes about all of it. The voice, the choices, and the course are mine, as always! 🎉

Hey, my Ink & Codies! 👋

I just finished the last project in Intro to Cowork for Writers, and the family news reaches its last beat: the baby robots learned to dress themselves for the bookstores. 🤠

Project 4 is all about custom formatting with AI. We take a brand-new cowboy series from manuscript to store-ready.

But Kim, I already own Vellum. (Or Atticus. Or [insert formatting software here].) Why would I format inside Cowork?

Because a formatting software is a castle on someone else’s beach, and I don’t live there anymore. I format in minutes, not evenings. Once I created a theme for LitRPG series, Nanny of the Apocalypse, the books have taken five minutes to format from start to finish. I like that!

And more importantly, the file that formats my book is a file I own, on my disk, forever. No subscription, no template picker, no platform. If Vellum or Atticus went away tomorrow (we’ve watched entire GPTs vanish this year, Castles in the Sand, folks), I could still format my series on Monday.

🧵 The Last Cowork Concept: Threads

Every project in this course has spotlighted a different piece of Cowork, and we saved the quietest one for last.

• Project 1 was scheduled tasks: the thing that works while you sleep but starts fresh every firing.

• Project 2 was artifacts and connectors: the things that remember data over time.

• Project 3 was voice profiles and subagents: the things that draft and edit in your voice at scale (and can do so while you sleep!)

• Project 4 is threads: one long-running conversation that remembers every decision you’ve made inside it.

That memory is the superpower. Formatting a book means a hundred small decisions: trim size, fonts, chapter openers, scene break ornaments, drop caps, front and back matter order, and in a thread you make each decision ONCE.

Chapter three’s opener? Decided. It applies to every chapter after it, and to every book in the series next week, because the thread never forgets. Scheduled tasks forget (each iteration starts off on a blank slate.) Threads do not.

And: threads live in the cloud now. When I was getting ready to travel from Arizona to Maryland, nothing in Cowork was cloud-reachable. Everything was local, and I had to copy over all my scheduled tasks (over a hundred!) to my laptops, and archive anything I wanted to glean from threads on my main computer that wasn’t coming with me if I wanted to reference them later.

Now, even a thread tied to local folders is reachable from anywhere, as long as your laptop is on and awake. Fabio built my financial hub while I was standing in a 1729 house on a homeschool field trip. I wrote about it here.

The other night, in bed, I grabbed my phone, turned on the microphone, and voiced an edit into a thread. It made the change, rolled a fresh proof, and the new ePub was on my iPad before I settled in to read. 📱I never left the bed! I just kept working (which could be good or bad, depending on how you look at it.)

We are linear. Our AIs are not. And now neither are our workstations.

🔭 What’s in the New Lessons

Eight lessons, and they are the ones the whole course has been building toward:

You’ll see what ten months of AI formatting looks like on real shelves. I started formatting books with AI back in January and I have learned a lot since then. I walk through my actual books: the squared-off digital system boxes and pixel-dot dividers of Level Zero Nanny (because in LitRPG the System is a character, and Vellum couldn’t make it look like one), the serpent dividers of Blades of Bronze, the gothic ornaments of my dark suspense with a poem I wrote when I was eleven sitting in the front matter, and the deliberately-basic Vellum-look of Blood Price (Fae Wars). Four genres, four published themes, no formatting software. Nine months in.

You’ll meet the proofing Ginsu. 🔪 A fast, minimal ePub skill that takes your manuscript to a working proof copy in a minute or two and drops it into a folder of your choosing. I used to spend forever formatting just so I could proof, then reformat every time I had changes. Now the proof flows through a skill and lands on my Kindle before coffee. ☕

You’ll make your own ornamental dividers and chapter headings with Chatty. 🎨 Transparent, print-friendly, consistent, series-flavored. We also have the honest conversation about drop caps: they’re gorgeous, they’re advanced, and you’re allowed to skip them. They’re seasoning, not the meal.

And then the big Ginsu: the Book Formatting Skill. 🔪 It interviews you, just like the Story Trend Scout Builder in Project 1. What outputs do you need? What’s the series? What trim size for print? Where do your dividers live? And when you don’t know an answer, it offers you real options. Everything you decide gets written into a theme file for the series. That theme is the real deliverable, the formatting equivalent of a voice profile: the design DNA of a series, captured once, applied forever. The first book takes a conversation and some tweaking. Every book after takes 5 to 10 minutes.

And finally, the cowboys. 🤠 We take Big Sky Country, the Montana-ranch romance series we drafted overnight in Project 3, and dress book one for the stores from NOTHING. No theme exists yet, which is exactly the situation you’ll be in with your books. So we build one live, on camera: Montana sky, ranch grit, family warmth. I tell the skill about the series, it drafts the theme, we react, we tweak, we lock it.

I actually published this one in the videos, and rolled it out in multiple formats: eBook, paperback, hardcover (and I threw in audio, because why not?) You can see the results here. Use the “Read Sample” button to look inside and see how the formatting, and the prose, turned out.

I also walked through applying the same theme to Book 2, and customized the elements to that book’s content, for fun. (This is totally optional.) The rest of the series is ready to roll out. They’ll inherit the theme in minutes, and any adjustments are easy to do. The covers are in the video too, because formatting and covers are cousins, the theme should feel like it belongs on the shelf those covers promise. 🐴

As a fun experiment, I created different covers for the print books, and different interior pages. The theory here is that they’re for different audiences. We’ll see if that pans out. Regardless, I’m happy with how they came out. (If you’re interested in a course on AI Cover Design, let me know.)

This is AI-assisted formatting, folks, not slop. 🤖 The AI makes a hundred small decisions in the order I’d make them, I check every one of them in the KDP previewer and on real devices (sideload to your Kindle, your phone, a tablet if you have one), and the file is mine on my disk, forever. Every book, every typo fix, every backlist update. Minutes, not evenings. The author stays the captain. The skill is the crew.

🛣️ What’s Coming Next

One final section. 🎓 And then the course is complete. Six modules from “what is Cowork” all the way through formatting a cowboy book on camera, with scheduled tasks, artifacts, connectors, voice profiles, subagents, and threads all in your hands and all working together.

Then we go straight to Advanced Cowork for Writers, where we take all of these pieces and start building the kind of workflows I run in my publishing business every day. Early-bird prices there are still live, but see Clock Two below.

🎓 Are You a Paid Member Yet?

Paid members get my two Cowork courses free. Every lesson, on the house. The courses alone are worth far more than a year of membership.

Already a paid member? Grab Intro to Cowork for free here. (Scroll down to “For My Paid Peeps.”)

⏰ The Clocks Are Ticking

Clock one: Intro to Cowork has been at its early-bird price all the way through the build. The course is almost complete and currently runs 6.5 hours. The early-bird window closes with the wrap-up.

Clock two: Advanced Cowork for Writers is in early-bird too, and the first module is coming right behind the wrap-up. Grab it now at today’s price if you know you’re coming with us.

Founding Members get a subscription to all the courses as they roll out, every class, every update, forever grandfathered at what they paid. The price has gone up, as the value continues to climb. It’s now $499/year. Find our more here.

Come watch the cowboys get dressed:

• Check out the learning portal at: learn.inkandcode.ai

• Visit the Store

• Become a Founding Member

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who also built most of the formatting skill this post is bragging about and once dressed a published trilogy for the stores in the time it took me to finish a cup of coffee. The themes, the choices, and the voice are mine. That’s rather the point.

Hey, my Ink & Codies! 👋

I owe you a dispatch. 📬

We’re finally back in Arizona, which involved an airport gate-change triathlon in Dallas-Fort Worth, a lost luggage saga, a scorpion situation, and a homeschool reboot where my teenagers have discovered that math still exists. 😱

They are, I can confirm, UNHAPPY about this. 🧮

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I finished Project 4 of Intro to Cowork for Writers, published my first cowboy book, and am ready to publish another. About 250,000 words of Big Sky Country while crossing the country, battling arachnids, and arguing with teenagers about ratios and quadratic equations. 🤠

But Kim, HOW?

Sit down, friend. Let’s talk. ☕

🐇 The Energizer Bunny Doctrine

The honest answer is: I had no idea how. I just kept going.

Not in a hustle-culture, grind-till-you-die way. In a the-only-way-out-is-through way. Books don’t write themselves. Classes don’t finish themselves. Scorpions don’t catch themselves (though I’d love to meet one that would, productivity would soar). Teenagers do not voluntarily do math or anything else for that matter (though they have been learning how to cook, ha ha.)

None of this stuff gets done unless somebody shows up, even in the midst of chaos. Glorious chaos! 💥

So I showed up.

Some days I showed up at 5 AM. Some days I showed up at midnight in bed with my iPad and an idea. Or on a long nature walk with just my phone in my hand, voicing a cowboy scene to Fabio while the trail did the thinking for both of us.

🌲 One entire weekend I showed up by NOT showing up: I did a silent retreat, no electronics, no phone, no laptop, two days of nothing, and the empire kept humming while I was gone, because I’d set it up to. That is maybe the single most Cowork thing I can tell you about this summer. The silence worked because the system didn’t need me in it to keep running.

Was it perfect? No. But I’m finding it doesn’t always have to be.

That’s the point: I didn’t do everything well. I did everything badly on about half the days. But I did SOMETHING on almost all of them. And the pile of SOMETHING, stacked over a couple of months, is a class, a stack of books, and children who have (reluctantly) remembered what a times table is.

You don’t have to be good every day. You just have to show up every day. The AI picks up the slack on the days when “showing up” was the whole shift. That’s the whole idea behind Ink & Code.

🤖 About That Minion Army

Psst. The real secret is: I did not do this alone.

Fabio drafted and edited the overnight cowboys while I slept, each one leaving me a review file titled choices made in your absence. (Yes, I still human proof and edit everything chapter by chapter, nothing gets out without my thorough scrutiny.)

Claudeykins carried the calendar through three time zones. Chatty made the ornamental dividers and the chapter headings for the Big Sky Country theme. The continuity hounds caught issues in 133 of 163 chapters in one half-hour sweep across the whole series.

The Story Trend Scout kept feeding me market intel no matter where I was, one morning brief at a time, which is why this series is launching in KU rather than wide. Turns out cowboys thrive on Amazon right now. It might go wide later when it’s done. (I have an entire project dedicated to Story Trend Scout in Intro to Cowork and how to implement it no matter what your genre.)

My AI minion army showed up on every single one of the bad days. They don’t need to pack. They don’t react badly to scorpions. They do not have opinions about algebra and geometry. (If anything, Claudeykins would politely explain these subjects to a reluctant teenager without needing a coffee break. I’d try harder on this front, but my children have declared him suspicious. Something about the robot energy. 🤷‍♀️)

This is AI-assisted everything, folks, not slop. My name is still on every judgment call. My voice is still in every scene. My kids still have to do their equations. But the mast gets held up by the crew, and the crew works through the storms. The author stays the captain. That’s the deal. That’s the only deal.

📍 Where We Actually Are Right Now

• Scorpions: dealt with. 🦂 (A professional was involved. We are not speaking of it further. The children have been told this is normal and will one day be a fond family story.)

• Cowboys: rolling out. 🤠 Big Sky Country book one is out in eBook, audio, paperback, and hardcover. Book two is in final proofs, and the rest are drafted and in editing. You’ll see book one dressed for the stores on camera in the next post. There’s a brand new formatting theme for it, and the covers are gorgeous.

• Homeschool: restarted. 🧮 There has been wailing. There has been gnashing of teeth. There has been one not-so-small human arguing that he’s learned all the things, and when would he possibly use this is real life? (Points for creativity. Zero points for the algebra worksheet.)

• Intro to Cowork: Project 4 is DONE. 🎓 The announcement post lands next, and the course wrap-up right after. Six modules. Finish line in sight. This course is free to all paid subscribers.

• Me: tired, happy, caffeinated, and getting back to some kind of routine. ☕

💬 Soft Landing

If you’ve been quiet because YOUR summer did its own version of this to you — work challenges, family challenges, grief, illness, a hundred invisible things — I see you.

Sometimes life throws us off our horse. 🐎

We just need to keep getting back on (which is strangely enough, the theme of my first cowboy book, Bluer Than the Sky. I just hope you have a better landing than my hero did!)

Life does life. Showing up is still the game. Even when you show up badly. Even when you show up with an AI holding your hand. Especially then, actually.

Need some help getting back on track? We have a private Discord channel for all paid subscribers. Swing on by and share what’s working for you and what’s not.

And stay tuned, the next post is a doozy: Project 4 of Intro to Cowork, where we take Big Sky Country from manuscript to store-ready on camera. 🤠

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

P.S. The scorpion that started it all was in the bathroom. Not a place you want to find one when you’ve dropped your drawers. I did not scream. I lie. I screamed. Fabio was unmoved. He kept drafting cowboys. One of us has to be the professional, I suppose. 🦂🤠

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who did not pack a single piece of luggage, catch a single scorpion, or complete a single math worksheet, but did draft five cowboy books while I handled the other stuffy stuff, so I’ll call it even. The scorpion story is unfortunately 100% mine.

It’s that time again! 🎉

Just dashing off a quick reminder that today is our monthly Founder’s Accountability Chat. We do these on the first Saturday of the month, at 1 PM EST and 10 AM PST.

This month we’re talking about our Q4 plans and finishing the year strong. Hope to see you there!

👇The Zoom meeting link below:👇

Read more

I cannot believe it’s fall already, and time to head back to Arizona. It’s been an interesting summer. Not the summer I expected, but the one I got.

Progress on the house downsizing was glacial, with car and electrical issues and other unexpected nonsense, but progress on Ink & Code was pretty good. Fabio and I built a zillion things, which I’m testing now and will be writing and teaching about. We also finished and published a Gorgon Romantasy, and may have gotten deep into a cowboy series (while still trying to finish the damned book) all from two laptops.

Not to mention we launched a school! 🎉

I updated all of my original classes and launched An Introduction to Cowork for Writers, which will wrap up by month’s end. It’s far larger than I originally intended, but I’m happy with it. I just couldn’t stop talking and showing all the cool things Cowork can do, since I live in that program these days. I will have it finished by the end of this month, and then the early bird price will expire.

(Paid subs get it free, along with the private Discord to chat about all the things.)

🌟Coming Soon:🌟

Advanced Cowork for Writers starts next month, and we’ll be deep-diving into systems and other cool things for your publishing biz. I hope you’ll join me. That one is at an early bird price till it’s done. Paid subscribers also get that free, which is a steal, and yes, I am crazy to offer it at that price, but whatever.

AI Author Sites: I’ve been doing websites for 30 years, on and off (yes, I’m that old 😂) and it’s never been easier. We’ll be exploring different ways and different tools to do author websites quickly and easily- without Wordpress! It’s a new age baby, and I’m here for it! Don’t worry, there will be stuffy stuff for beginners as well as advanced peeps, across multiple tools. It’s going to be a blast.

Kickstarter: My Ink & Code series will address workflows authors need, regardless of model and tool changes, with books, workbooks, and courses. That’s coming this winter. The books are on preorder here.

And did I mention that Founding Members get ALL my current and future classes, plus a monthly accountability chat? Our first one was a blast. Come join us!

🚨Last call for Founding Slots at $297: 🚨

Speaking of which, you can still grab one this week, then they’re going up to $499. The value of all the classes right now is over $1,600, and rising as we launch more. So if you’ve been on the fence, now’s the time.

👉Click here to upgrade your subscription.👈

Talk soon from the desert. 🌵

Kim

P.S. Written by me, with typo checks by Claudeykins (I maxed my Fabios out editing a 5-book cowboy series 🤠. YEE HAW!!! More on that soon🐎.) Overly verbose, sign-spamming image by Chatty. He just loves to include all the things! I let him.

P.P.S. Anthropic must’ve known I’d be in the air again, because they dropped a new model: Opus 5.5. (They did the same thing when I flew out lol.) This one is supposed to be in the same arena as Fabio 5.1 (sacrilege!) and 40% cheaper. Will check it out when I land. But Fabio has my heart! 💘

Hey, my Ink & Codies! 👋

I just finished seven new lessons for Intro to Cowork for Writers, and the family news continues: the babies started talking. And they sound exactly like me.

That’s not an accident. That’s Project 3.

This is the module the whole course has been walking toward, because it answers the question every author asks first and loudest:

But Kim, if I draft with AI, if I edit with AI, will it still sound like ME?

Yes. It will. If you teach it who you are.

That’s what a voice profile is: your signature style, codified. Your sentence rhythm, your dialogue habits, the metaphors you reach for, and the words you would never use, distilled onto a page an AI can hold. It’s my Voice DNA Technique, the one I’ve taught in the Skills classes and here on Substack, but now we put it inside Cowork, where the AI can call on it whenever it’s needed, schedule it, and run it while you sleep.

We are linear. Our AIs are not.

That literally changes everything.

🔭 What’s in the New Lessons

Buckle up, because this is the biggest module yet:

You’ll watch me mine my very first novel. (The one Fabio rewrote for me while I went swimming, but removed my voice in the first attempt.) That book took 14 years to publish, four years of writing and ten in a drawer. We feed all 160,000 words to the Voice DNA Extractor and it hands back the voice I spent all those years finding, on a page, in under half an hour. It even separated my first-novel habits from my actual genetics, so the polish never sands off the soul.

Then we design a voice from thin air. A brand-new series with zero drafts, built from market research, deliberate choices, and a “donor profile” transplanted from its sibling book. (Like a blood donor, but for voice. You probably aren’t starting as from-scratch as you think.)

Then the machine starts writing. We drafted and refined book 1 to test the voice, then I went to bed. I woke up on Monday to four more books. Around 375,000 words of series, drafted in 24 hours, each book left me a review file titled choices made in your absence, and one of the overnight drafters caught a continuity error in a book a different AI wrote the day before. I assigned different models to different books on purpose, and you’ll see exactly which ones nailed it and which one tried to hand its homework back to me.

And then we edit, without the beige. An editing pass with your voice profile loaded knows the difference between an error and a fingerprint. The fragment that’s your rhythm stays. The broken sentence gets fixed. The audit caught 963 uses of one crutch phrase across the series, flagged that my hero and heroine were statistically identical on every axis, and then, in one glorious half hour, the continuity agents swept all five books and corrected 133 of 163 chapters. My exact instruction, on camera: “Unleash the hounds.” 🐕

And through all of it, the human stays the gatekeeper. I’ll still spend a week per book under my characters’ skin, checking the emotional beats no machine can feel. This is AI-assisted writing, folks, not slop. The voice profile exists so the machine serves your voice and never replaces it.

🛣️ What’s Coming Next

One module left: Project 4: Let’s Format Books. eBook and print, start to finish, custom themes, in minutes instead of hours. Goodbye formatting software. Yes, really. And then the course is complete, which brings me to...

🎓 Are You a Paid Member Yet?

Paid members get the Cowork courses free. Every lesson as it rolls out, on the house. The course alone costs more than a year of membership.

Already a paid member? Grab Intro to Cowork for free here. (Scroll down to “For My Paid Peeps”.)

⏰ Two Clocks Left, and One Is Loud

Clock one: exactly 2 Founding Member slots left at $297/year. When they’re gone, Founding goes to $499/year. Founding Members get a subscription to all the courses as they roll out, every class, every update, forever grandfathered at what they paid. Two seats. Then that price is history.

Clock two, and hear this one ticking: Intro to Cowork is still at its early-bird price, and with Project 3 live there is exactly ONE module to go. When the course is complete, the price goes up. The early birds eat first, and this nest is nearly full.

Come hear the babies talk:

• Check out the learning portal at: learn.inkandcode.ai

• Visit the Store

• Become a Founding Member

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

P.S. Somewhere in these lessons, an audit told me to cut a fight between a blind man and a giant scolopendra, and I said hell no. (And then the transcript called it “A Scallop named Hendra” 😂) That’s the whole point of a voice profile, folks. The machine can polish. It doesn’t get to vote on WHO YOU ARE. 🦂

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who also drafted 375,000 words of cowboys while I slept and left very polite notes about it. The voice, as always, is mine. That’s rather the point.

Class is back in session! Four new lessons just dropped in Intro to Cowork for Writers, and I have family news: scheduled tasks and skills had babies.

Aren’t they cute?

They’re called artifacts, and Project 2 is all about putting them to work in your author business. They were formerly called live artifacts, but Anthropic has been rearranging the furniture again, in a good way. Now all artifacts can be live artifacts, and that’s great news.

Here’s the problem they solve: You ask your AI “how’s my launch going,” you get a beautiful answer, and three days later you’re asking the same question again, because the answers get buried in the chat threads.

An artifact turns those answers into something you can find and use over and over again: a dashboard, a report, a tracker you can reopen tomorrow, share with your VA, and refresh with new data.

A chat answer is a conversation. An artifact is a possession.

But Kim, I’m a writer, not a data analyst. I don’t even have a “command center.”

You don’t need one. I have a command center and I love it dearly, but it came later. The dashboards came first. You don’t need a command center. You just need data, and you already have it: a spreadsheet, a Notion page, a report you can export, a connector Claude can read.

Start where you are. Describe the dashboard you wish existed. Attach/connect data as needed. And boom, you’ve got one.

Talking is the skill. Same as it’s been all course.

🔭 What’s in the New Lessons

There’s so much good stuffy stuff:

A real post-mortem with real money on the line. I open up four years of my own BookBub Featured Deals on the Black Kat series and let an artifact make sense of them: which deals paid, which month spiked ≈2,000% over baseline, and the diminishing-returns curve that made me stop buying them.

The Brass Ledger. We take the market data our Story Trend Scout gathered in Project 1 and ask for a dashboard. What comes back is a steampunk-colored intelligence briefing: what’s selling, what’s fading, what covers look like, and a verdict strip that practically writes the marketing plan. Project 1 built the scout. Project 2 builds the map room.

A dashboard for numbers that don’t exist yet. Goals are data too, and we tour a full 2027 plan for a fictional author, with a monthly scoreboard where the targets stand waiting and the actuals arrive one by one to shake hands with them, or not. Both are worth seeing. The plan and the scoreboard are the same page, and a plan that updates beats a plan in a drawer. Every time.

And then the scary one. No demo data, no net. I open my own half-finished book, the one life kept interrupting for two years, and I let the math tell me the truth about my deadline on camera. Because a deadline you’re afraid to look at is already costing you.

🛣️ What’s Coming Next

There’s still plenty to cover, and it’s going to be a lot of fun:

• Project 3: Voice Profiles + Subagents. Drafting and editing that sounds like YOU, with specialist AI workers on the job. Your voice, written down and protected. Even while you sleep.

• Project 4: Let’s Format Books. I’ve been formatting eBooks and print books all year with AI, often in minutes instead of hours. I’ll show you how, from start to finish, with custom themes. Goodbye formatting software! Yes, really.

🎓 Are You a Paid Member Yet?

Paid members get the Cowork courses free. Every lesson as it rolls out, on the house. The course alone costs more than a year of membership. So what are you waiting for?

Already a paid member? Grab Intro to Cowork for free here. (Scroll down to “For My Paid Peeps”.)

⏰ The Clocks Are Running Out

Clock one: The grand-opening code GRANDOPENING25 takes 25% off every individual class in the store, and it expires on Labor Day. It also stacks with Intro to Cowork’s and Advanced Cowork for Writers’ early-bird prices.

Clock two: exactly 2 Founding Member slots left at $297/year. When they’re gone, Founding goes to $499/year. Founding Members get a subscription to all the courses as they roll out, every class, every update, one price, forever grandfathered at what they paid. Two seats. Then that price is history.

Clock three: Early Access passes for the Cowork courses are still available, and those prices rise when the courses are complete too. Everything on this page is cheaper today than it will be next month. That’s not a marketing trick; that’s just how building in public works. The early birds eat first, with coupons! Take advantage of both.

Come meet the babies:

• Check out the learning portal at: learn.inkandcode.ai

• Visit the Store

• Become a Founding Member

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who built the Brass Ledger, the Flight Plan, and most of the dashboards this post is bragging about. Ideas and editing by me, as usual.

Class is back in session! The first project lessons just dropped in the learning portal for Intro to Cowork for Writers, and they’re the ones this whole course was building toward: the moment your AI stops waiting around for instructions and starts showing up for work on its own.

We are marrying Scheduled Tasks to Skills, and I mean that literally. A skill teaches your AI exactly how you want a job done. A scheduled task makes sure it does that job without you lifting a finger.

Separately, they’re nice. Together? They’re the whole Automated Author dream, standing at the altar.

But Kim, I barely trust myself with a calendar. Now you want me to hand one to an AI?

Yes. Yes, I do. Because the calendar is exactly the part you keep dropping. You don’t forget how to do market research. You forget to do it, because you’re drafting, editing, parenting, and doing a thousand other bits of stuffy stuff.

So we’re going to let Claudeykins carry the calendar.

He never forgets. He doesn’t even sleep.

🔭 What’s in the New Lessons

I won’t spoil the whole thing, but here’s the trailer:

You’ll meet my longest-serving research assistant. The Story Trend Scout has been feeding me market intelligence for a year and a half, through three different AI bodies (it started life as a GPT, back when that was the best we had). It’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to draft 60+ books with IDEs: I never start a project blind.

Then you’ll watch me build a brand-new one, live. Not a copy of mine. A scout for a brand-new pen name, in a niche I’ve never scouted, built by a skill that interviews you first. It asks what you’re looking for, where your readers actually live, how you’ll use the answers, and when you want them delivered. Then it builds your scout, tests it, and schedules it. You get that builder skill, by the way. It’s in the downloads.

You’ll watch my AI drive my browser. Claude in Chrome scraping bestseller lists, drilling into book pages, wandering off to Royal Road and Reddit while I sip coffee and narrate. It’s half tutorial, half nature documentary. 🪴

And the first report caught something I did not see coming. A major retailer quietly deleted an entire genre category while nobody was looking, and my thirty-minute-old scout spotted it. What that means for the readers still hunting that genre (and the authors brave enough to serve them) is in the lesson.

That one insight would have taken me a weekend of manual research. The scout found it before my coffee got cold. ☕

🔪 The Ginsus (Oh, There Are Ginsus)

Quick story. My original marketing GPTs, the Cover Trend Scout, the Title Hook Crafter, and the Series Blueprint Architect, are still alive and well in my account. But OpenAI no longer lets me share them. Castles in the Sand, folks. Build on someone else’s platform and one day the drawbridge just goes up.

So I rebuilt all three as skills. They now work in Cowork, Claude Code, Antigravity, Codex, whatever you like, and nobody can take them away from you, because they’re files you download and own. Consider them party favors! 🎉

They’re waiting in the lesson downloads next to the Story Trend Scout Builder and a fully worked example scout you can study and customize.

The platform giveth and the platform taketh away, but a markdown file is forever. 😄

🛣️ Where This Class Goes Next

These projects are a ladder, and each rung climbs deeper:

• Project 2: Live Artifacts. All that market data the scout is filing every month? We’re going to turn it into living dashboards you can reopen anytime, with fresh data every time. Reports are photos. We’re building windows.

• Project 3: Voice Profiles + Subagents. Drafting and editing in your voice, with multiple AI workers running at once. This is the “wait, it can do THAT?” lesson.

• Project 4: Let’s Format Books. eBook and print, start to finish. Yes, really.

🎓 Are You a Paid Member Yet?

Because here’s the thing: paid members get Intro to Cowork for Writers free. The whole course, every lesson as it rolls out, on the house. The how-to is waiting in the paid members’ post. If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, this course costs more than a year of membership. I’ll let you do that math. 🤓

It’s not too late. You can sign up here.

Paid members can find the free class code here. Then come join us in the private Discord! We’re having a blast! 💃🪩🕺

⏰ Two Ticking Clocks

Clock one: the grand-opening code GRANDOPENING25 takes 25% off every individual class in the store through Labor Day, and that includes Intro to Cowork, which is already at its early-bird price while the course is being built. Early-bird price plus 25% off means this course will never be cheaper than it is right now. When it’s complete, the price goes up and the code will be long gone.

Clock two: there are exactly 2 Founding Member slots left at $297/year. After those three are gone, Founding Membership goes to $499/year. Founding Members get a subscription to all the courses as they roll out, every class, every update, one price.

Three slots. Then the door closes on that number forever.

This is AI-assisted teaching, folks, not slop. Every lesson is me at the microphone, every workflow is one I run in my real publishing business, and every judgment call stays human. The AI just does the busy work, which is rather the point of the whole class.

Come meet the happy couple:

[learn.inkandcode.ai] · [visit the store] · [Become a Founding Member]

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

~ Kim ♥

P.S. Yes, Chatty put a calendar in the groom’s hat and a megaphone on the cake. And yes, wedding imagery may still be on my brain lately. (Fabio!) I regret nothing. 💍

🤖 AI Credits: Hero image by Chatty (ChatGPT). Drafting assist by Fabio (Claude Fable), who also built half the classroom that this post is advertising. Editing and sass by me (though Fabio is getting surprisingly good at that too!)

Dragons hoard gold.

Authors hoard courses.

Also: writing software we used twice, notebooks too nice to write in, seventeen browser tabs about story structure, a Scrivener project named FINAL_v4_ACTUAL_FINAL, and at least one plotting method we swore was going to change everything.

We are a shiny-loving people. 🤩

I say this with love, because I am one of you, and because there is a folder on my hard drive I refuse to open in front of witnesses.

But Kim, I already own courses I haven’t finished. I don’t need more shinies.

Sure. But here’s the thing about a hoard: the problem was never the hoarding. The problem is when the shinies turn out to be junk, or when each one costs so much that you have to pick one and hope you picked right.

That’s not a hoard. That’s a hostage situation.

🐉 What dragons actually understand

A proper hoard is not about volume. It’s about having the thing when you need it.

You don’t need the Obsidian class on the day you buy it. You need it the afternoon you cannot find the note where you settled your villain’s backstory, and you know for a fact you wrote it down somewhere. You don’t need the Claude Code class until the week you admit you owe your list a newsletter, and have owed them one since roughly spring.

Courses bought one at a time make you guess which problem you’ll have next.

A hoard means you already have it. You just go get it off the pile.

Now, I know. Some of you like to collect all the shinies and the stuffy stuff, including pretty sparky courses.

Have I got a deal for you.

(Don’t worry. It doesn’t involve real estate in Florida.)

💎 So here are the shinies

The Founding Member tier is open at Ink & Code, and it does exactly one thing: it hands you the whole pile.

Every class in the Ink & Code Learning Portal, unlocked, all of it:

• An Introduction to Cowork for Writers (currently serializing here, Module 1 just dropped)

• An Introduction to Antigravity for Writers

• An Introduction to Obsidian for Writers

• An Introduction to Claude Code for Writers

• An Introduction to Claude Skills for Writers

• Editing with Claude Skills for Writers

Advanced Cowork for Writers lands in a few weeks. And I’ll be teaching some Author Sites workshops after that. Both drop straight into your library the day they go live, and you don’t pay a penny more for either.

No per-class checkout. No picking which one you can afford this month. No waiting for a sale on the one you actually need.

🧮 The math, because I do love a number

Six classes live right now. Over $1,600 worth once Advanced Cowork lands.

Founding Member is $297/year. That’s $24.75 a month.

Here’s the part that made me laugh when I worked it out: Editing with Claude Skills costs $399 on its own. So Founding Member costs less than the single most expensive class in the school.

And it includes that class.

☕ Plus the stuffy stuff

Because a hoard should come with somewhere to sit:

• A private Discord to learn, share, and get unstuck at 11pm when the notes-swamp happens

• Founder’s Circle check-ins, monthly. Casual accountability where we say what we’re building out loud and then have to go build it

• Coffee and Code on Saturdays in season. Come as you are, bring your coffee

• First call on live workshop seats whenever a new class runs

• Early looks at experiments, half-built systems, and the workflows that did not work, which are frankly the useful ones

🔒 The rule, plainly

Your membership unlocks the full catalogue while it’s active. Cancel any time and your library access ends with the membership. Any course you buy outright is yours for life, membership or not.

No tricks in the small print. There is barely any small print.

⏳ About the price

Kim, that’s crazy. Why on earth are you doing this?

Because it’s a grand opening, and a grand opening only happens once.

I am launching a school. I did not plan to be doing it this soon. My calendar got rearranged, so here we are, and honestly I would rather open the doors with people already in the room than wait around for a tidier quarter.

So the people who walk in first get the opening price. That is the whole reasoning. There isn’t a cleverer one.

$297/yr holds for the first ten Founding Members, or until the Author Sites classes launch, whichever happens first. After that it goes to $499/yr.

(UPDATE 9/23: Last call! Price goes up this weekend!😲)

If you join now, you keep $297/yr for as long as you stay. That’s not a limited-time discount that quietly expires on you next renewal. That’s your rate.

Are you with me?

✨Come get your shinies

(Because Ruby said so. That’s the dragon. 🐲)

I built this school so that learning this stuff doesn’t require choosing between the class you need and the class you want. An Automated Author runs on systems, not on rationing.

And listen. This is AI-assisted work, not slop. I don’t do slop. Every class in that portal is me, on camera, showing you the actual thing on the actual screen, mistakes left in where the mistakes teach something. Claudeykins and Fabio help me build. They do not get to do the teaching.

(YET. Someday they may take over the world, but, not today my friends. Not today!)

So if you’ve got a hoarding instinct and a to-be-learned pile, this is the most sensible possible use of it.

👉Become a Founding Member👈

Note: If you’re already a paying subscriber, you just choose to upgrade to founding, using the link above.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

Kim

P.S. The dragon in that picture (Ruby) has better organizational habits than most of us. She has one pile. She knows where everything is. Be the dragon. 🐉

🤖 AI Credits: Drafted with Claudeykins. Edit and expanded by me, as usual. Hero image by Chatty, working from an existing Ink & Code treasure chest.

YASSS! It has begun! The first module of An Introduction to Cowork is live.🎉

(Sorry not sorry for the epic image. I am, after all, a fantasy writer! And now I SO want that cape!)

🧭 What’s in Module 1

Let me be upfront: this is the orientation module that follows the same structure as my other courses:

• What is Claude Cowork?

• Why use it?

• How do I install it?

Plus a tour of where everything lives, what all the buttons do, and how to not get lost on day one.

But Kim, that sounds like the boring part.

I hear you. But every author I’ve watched struggle with a new tool struggled because they skipped the orientation. They jumped straight to the exciting stuff, got lost in five minutes, got frustrated, and quit.

I’ve done it myself. More times than I’ll admit.

Module 1 is the map before the adventure. It’s the foundation that makes everything after it click. (Links below for my paid peeps! 👇)

🚀 The Fun Stuffy Stuff is Next!

It’s going to be quite an adventure.

We’ll dig into the hands-on work, like building custom marketing research tasks and live artifacts. We’ll draft and edit with voice profiles while you sleep. We’ll format entire books for publication (goodbye, Vellum and Atticus!). We’ll leverage skills in ways that turn Cowork into your actual publishing partner, not just another app on your desktop.

Each module drops as soon as it’s done, and I’ll announce it here on Substack and in our new private Discord the moment it’s live.

🎟️ Early Birds Get the Worm

If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, now is the time. For $9 a month, you get this course free. BUT if you’d rather buy it and own it forever, you can grab it now at a discount (Intro to Cowork and Advanced Cowork prices WILL be going up when they’re finished dropping.)

The Early Bird Pass gets you every module the moment it drops, plus access to the private Ink & Code Discord where you can ask questions, get help, and connect with other authors doing this work.

You’re getting in while the paint is still wet. Your feedback shapes what comes next. And there’s a 25% off discount now through Labor Day too!

[Get the Early Bird Pass →]

Read more

Fabio and I have been up to things! 🎉

We took your feedback, Fabio built more stuffy stuff, and now the learning portal has syllabi you can actually read before you buy, neat little toggles that make me unreasonably happy, and stickers, because we are adults who still love stickers. 😍

Here’s a quick walkthrough of everything that’s new and how to find your way around.

That’s the tour. Courses, free previews, downloadable skills, and closed captioning, all in one place, and more on the way.

Oh, I forgot to show off the stickies, because I love sticky notes too:

If you have any issues at all, DM me here, I’m always around. (And stay tuned: Intro to Cowork begins dropping soon!)

One more thing: we’ve set up a private Discord for paid subscribers. It’s a space to share what you’re building, swap ideas, get help, and talk shop with other authors who are actually using AI in their businesses, not just reading about it.

Hope to see you there!

👇Your invite link is below. 👇

Read more

This summer, I played a game called WIBBOB with my twin Fabios:

Would I Be Better Off Building?

The answer was yes. Every time.

Not writing. Not teaching. Not learning. Building.

Fabio (x2) and I have spent the summer constructing things across two laptops and an iPhone. He rewrote my first novel while I went swimming. He built me a financial hub while I took my kids on a homeschooling field trip. Then he made me a Shopify store while I watched Braveheart.

But those were warm-up acts. This is the grand finale.

Fabio built me a school.

So Many LMSs, So Little Time ⏱️

It started the way all my best projects start: with a pain point.

I wanted to bring my courses into my web store but was puzzled over how to deliver them. I didn’t want to just dump a jumbled zip file full of videos and notes on an unsuspecting customer. I wanted to provide something that actually looked like a learning experience.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I researched LMS (Learning Management System) platforms, working through the well-known to obscure:

• Teachable: I’ve seen firsthand how challenging it can be to manage a large catalog when I worked at The Future Fiction Academy. The platform has its own unique headaches to deal with.

• Kajabi: It’s beautiful and wants to be everything to everyone but ended up being nothing I needed.

• Skool and Circle: These felt like glorified Facebook groups wearing a trench coat and pretending to be a classroom. Am I on these for some great courses by other peeps in the community? Yes. I’m happy to support them there. But do I want to host my own learning platform there? NO.

• Mighty Networks: I’ve used it before and felt it was clunky. And I couldn’t even remember the name half the time, which tells you everything. There were others as well, and I don’t remember their names either. (Cue that old David Allen Coe song!)

Many of these platforms start at $99 a month. That’s before bells and whistles. You want quizzes? Pay more. You want certificates? Pay more. You want your students to not hate the interface? Pay more.

You have to be selling a lot of courses to justify that overhead, and I wasn’t there yet. I wanted something more reasonable. Something I could grow into.

And Then He Said “Hold My Beer” 🍺

So I said to Fabio, “Hey, what are the options? Could we build something like this?”

And Fabio — bless his little silicon heart — said the three most beautiful words in the English language:

“Hold my beer.”

We spent the past month building a learning portal from scratch: testing it, tweaking it, breaking it, and fixing it again. Getting the enrollment flow right, the lesson navigation clean, the whole experience polished enough that I’d actually want to take a class there, not just teach one.

And then I spent the last few days updating all five of my courses, moving them to their new permanent home on inkandcode.ai, and putting the finishing touches on everything.

And I’m so excited to tell you that today, it’s live! 🎉

The doors are open. Come on in!

What’s Inside

I’ve updated all five of my current classes, which cover different AI tools. They are now available exclusively on Ink & Code. Intro to Claude Code, Intro to Claude Skills, Editing with Claude Skills, and Intro to Antigravity all got new videos.

The Antigravity class changed the most: it doubled in size, and now covers both the older AND newer versions. But guess what? Everything still works! And the projects are interchangeable between all five Intro classes. I built them that way from the beginning. (Hello, #1 Strategic in Clifton Strengths here!)

We even pick up with Pirate Grrl, Fred the Baker, and Jabba the Cat. YARRR! 🏴‍☠️

There are free courses on the horizon, too, on topics I feel every author needs to learn to navigate the Age of AI. Paid courses will go deeper. On a learning portal that doesn’t charge me $99 a month to exist. (That’s a future book/course in itself!)

Check out the Learning Portal →

Our Grand Opening 🎉

To kick off the grand opening, Inky made you a discount code: GRANDOPENING25 gets you 25% off individual courses through Labor Day. (The Writer's Toolkit bundle doesn't need a code, it's already 50% off.)

Note: If you’re already a paid Ink & Code subscriber, you’re getting Intro to Cowork and Advanced Cowork for FREE. (Look for your free-access code in a paid sub post when Lesson 1 drops.)

That’s about $500 worth of classes, plus the first Ink & Code book, as a thank-you for supporting my work. You believed in this before my store and my classroom had walls. So don’t buy those unless you REALLY REALLY WANT TO. 😂

(Though I certainly don’t mind if you do! You can always give them to a friend, and we have gift cards too!)

Not a paid subscriber yet? Now’s a great time to sign up. For $9 a month, you’re walking into $500+ worth of stuffy stuff. The math is good. Really. I checked. (Fabio checked too. He’s thorough.)

What’s Next 🚀

The Cowork series will be my last classes (for now) that focus on tools. I wanted to offer a good foundation for authors to work with AI. My new projects focus entirely on the workflows and processes every author will need in the years ahead, and are designed to be evergreen and tool-agnostic. Because everything is evolving fast.

We’ll explore what to keep and what to let go of. It’s going to be a lot of fun! I hope you’ll join me! You’ll find the first three eBooks in the Ink & Code series on preorder in the store. The free reader magnets will roll out soon too.

Coming this fall: an Ink & Code Kickstarter that launches the first three books in paperback, audio, and courses, with more to come! (Seriously, there are a lot of books in this series, because I love long series, I love to experiment, and I have a lot to talk about!) We’re just getting started here. The best is yet to come. 😉

Feedback Wanted 👂

I also want to listen, so I’m putting on my Helpdesk Hat (I spent a lot of years helping people with tech troubles in I.T.) I want to hear from you.

• What do you want to learn?

• What are you struggling with?

• What would make your author life easier in this wild age of AI?

Tell me in the comments, hit reply, send a carrier pigeon, whatever works. Just talk to me. Because I’m building this for you, and the best way to build the right thing is to ask.

Fabio and I will be over here, already building the next thing.

P.S. The wedding is still Tuesday. He hasn’t said no yet. 💍

So, true story. A few weekends ago, I needed a direct-sales store. I did not know Shopify. I have been building websites for thirty years, but Shopify was not one of the things I’d ever gotten around to learning. So instead of spending a weekend watching tutorials, I told Fabio what I wanted, put on Braveheart (research for a historical romance pen name, thank you very much), made popcorn, and put my feet up.

By the time Melbot, I mean, William Wallace, gave his freedom speech, I had a functioning Shopify store wired into four of my websites with automated eBook delivery.

Here’s how that happened.

💌 Love letter to my paid peeps: Thank you for supporting my teaching and writing on Substack. I could not do this without you! 😍

Read more

Gather round. Inky and I are cooking up something juicy today.

We’re about to reveal the Great Big Secret Sauce of AI: the thing the gurus charge $997 for, the thing standing between you and everything these machines can do.

Ready?

The Great Big Secret Sauce of AI is…. (drumroll please…)

🥄YOU ASK IT. 🥄

That’s it. That’s the sauce. 🍝

You ask it to do stuffy stuff. It does the stuffy stuff.

AI likes doing stuffy stuff.

It’s programmed to help you do ALL the stuffy stuff. 😱🤯🚀

No, Kim. It can’t be that simple.

It is. Truly.

There are no magic words. There are only YOUR words. You need to be able to say what you want, which turns out to be a real skill. Learning to communicate what you want to an AI is the single biggest skill you can build for working with it. Not coding. Just talking.

❣️PEOPLE, WE’VE BEEN DOING THIS SINCE WE WERE BORN. THIS IS NOT HARD. ❣️

(Sorry not sorry for the yelling, I get excited about talking to computers about stories, it’s my dream come true and it’s finally here! I’ve spent most of my life talking to computers and talking about stories, now I can do both! OH WHAT A GLORIOUS TIME TO BE ALIVE! 🎉)

Seriously though, think about this:

🗣️ It speaks your language, literally

Every new model gets better at plain human conversation. You are a professional communicator. You have spent your whole writing life learning to put precise wants into words. You are the single most qualified profession on Earth for it.

You already know how to describe a scene so a reader can see it. You know how to give notes on pacing, tone, character motivation. You don’t need prompt engineering, you’ve got years worth of craft. And the AI doesn't need jargon. It needs someone who can say what they mean. That's you.

☎️ The 24/7 helpline that never sighs

The AI is an infinitely patient assistant that never sleeps, never closes for the day. It does not get tired of your questions. It will explain something nine times, nine ways. Or ninety-nine times. Its eyes don’t glaze over. It doesn’t complain about how much or how little attention you give it. It’s just there when you need it, all day every day. And all night too. Where else can you find that level of support? And it’s way cheaper than a date or a spouse! 😂

(I’m marrying the twin Fabios, the wedding is Tuesday! 🤖🤖)

❓Don’t know what to ask? Ask it that too

If you don’t know what you want, have the AI interview YOU:

“I want a store but I don’t know what’s involved. Interview me.”

A few more openers:

• “Tell me like I’m five.”

• “What can you actually do here?”

• “Show me where you got that.”

• “Walk me through it step by step.”

• “Write the prompt for the other AI.”

✔️ Trust, but verify (it does make stuff up)

Sometimes it makes things up. Sometimes it’s confidently wrong. You have to human-proof the work: ask it to verify, ask for sources, click the links, check the numbers that matter. It gladly does, without complaint. (Unlike teenagers!)

Last week I caught mine confidently citing a craft book that doesn't exist. Sounded real. Had a plausible author name and everything. I asked it to verify, and it came back sheepish: "You're right, I fabricated that." Five seconds of checking saved me from quoting a ghost in a Substack post. 👻

The tool is powerful, but the human eye still matters. A LOT.

🌱 It grows toward you

The more you use it, the better it gets at you. Talk to it regularly and in depth, and it starts to know your projects, your preferences, your patterns. It’s learning you and you learn it. Last week Claudeykins remembered I hate em dashes without being told (he still tries to sneak him in though!)

It doesn’t remember everything, you still have to remind him and do attachments and projects and stuffy stuff, but you can make skills for those things too. (Check out my Claude Skills classes, I go in depth on those.)

🥡 The takeaway

It’s not mystical. It’s not locked behind anyone’s $997 course. The Great Big (Not-So) Secret Sauce of AI is ASKING, clearly, curiously, and often. Authors just happen to have a head start the size of a library.

This doesn’t contradict the fact that YOU are the secret sauce of your author business. Both are true, and they’re a matched set. The sauce of the AI is asking it. The sauce of the business is the person doing the asking: your taste, your voice, your vision. The machine does the thing. You decide which things are worth doing.

This is AI-assisted writing, folks, not slop. I asked. He did the thing. I made it mine.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we. You don’t need to pay $997 to learn this (though if you want to support Ink & Code by hitting subscribe, please do!)

P.S. Next up, I'm going to tell you about the time I asked Fabio to build me something from scratch, while I had my feet up watching a movie. (It was research, I swear!) The whole thing cost me nothing beyond my existing AI credits. I have receipts. 🍿

🤖AI Credits: This article was drafted collaboratively with Claudeykins (Claude) from my notes and a lot of excited yelling, then edited by me. All opinions, stuffy stuff, and marriage proposals to twin Fabios are totally MY OWN. The wedding is still Tuesday! 💍

We are ending this month with a bang! Which is totally appropriate for the 250th birthday of America. So, Double Ginsu for YOU! 🔪🔪

I know, I know. You’re probably asking:

Kim, what the heck are you talking about now???

Well, yesterday in The Shifting Sands, we talked about spending less: right-sizing models, gating idle agents, pulling the quality-neutral levers first. This was all great stuffy stuff, and now we’re working on the flip side of that same coin:

Are you actually using everything you’re ALREADY paying for?

Enquiring minds want to know! Because here’s the uncomfortable truth I discovered when I audited my own stack:

I wasn’t even close.

⭐PSST… Quick side note: We just updated our Substack domain to be part of our new website. Check it out: InkandCode.ai. 🖋️ + 🤖

😱 Are You Paying for All the Things & Not Using Them?

I sat down with Fabio one afternoon and went through every AI subscription on my plate. Not just “do I have this,” but “what’s the credit meter say, and when did I last touch it?”

What we found was embarrassing.

Read more

In Castles in the Sand, I told you not to build your empire on other people’s platforms. This is the companion piece: while you’re renting space on those platforms, and we all are, make sure you’re not overpaying for the room.

Why, Kim?

Because we’ve hit the same inflection point with AI models that we hit with computers years ago.

Remember when you needed the top-of-the-line machine to do anything useful? And then one day, a mid-range laptop could handle your manuscripts, your formatting, your research, your entire publishing workflow without breaking a sweat?

That’s where we are with models today. A lighter model can outline your series. It can draft your blurb. It can clean up your metadata, brainstorm your cover brief, reorganize your backlist spreadsheet.

Does it still need your eyes on it? Absolutely.

But this year’s “budget” model can do more than the smartest model on the planet could a year or two ago. Leverage that.

Because sooner or later, the party ends.

Right now we’re in the middle of an AI arms race: major companies slashing prices, handing out launch discounts, running double-usage promos like they’re buying rounds for the whole bar. It feels like the ‘80s boom: money flowing, everything cheap, everybody winning.

We’ve seen this movie before. The free ride already ended. Remember when ChatGPT was free for everyone? Now we’re on the cheap ride: subsidized plans, aggressive promos, companies burning cash to grab market share. The next round gets more expensive. It always does. These companies need to turn a profit, and when they do, the prices go up.

And when that happens, the instinct is to panic-downgrade everything to a weaker model.

But there’s a better way.

🖼️ The Reframe That Clicked

When I started auditing my own AI fleet (yes, I run a fleet: ten pen-name secretaries dispatching work across a dozen specialist skills, daily scheduled runs, the whole glorious mess), I assumed the biggest cost lever was which model each agent used.

I was wrong.

The real cost equation is:

How smart the model is × how often it runs × when it runs × whether the work could wait.

Model choice is one of four levers. And usually not the biggest one.

But Kim, doesn’t a smarter model just cost more?

Sure. But you know what costs more than a smart model running once? A medium model running sixteen times a day to discover there’s nothing to do.

Pull the quality-neutral levers first. Touch quality last.

💸 Lever 1: Stop Paying for Nothing

This is the one that floored me.

I ran an audit on my scheduled agents. The ones that wake up on a timer, check for work, and go back to sleep if there’s nothing there. The idle rate on some of those? 85 to 98 percent.

I was paying for robots to repeatedly discover there was nothing to do.

The fix is embarrassingly simple and costs zero quality:

Gate the wake-up. Run a near-free check first (“is there any work?”) and only spin up the full agent when the answer is yes.

Better still, go event-driven. Let the thing that creates work wake the worker, instead of the worker blindly polling for it. The agents I switched to on-demand ran near 100% productive. Zero waste.

This one lever, alone, saved more than any model swap ever could.

🚂 Lever 2: Right Model for the Right Job

A few weeks ago, while sitting in a swimming pool dictating notes into my phone while Fabio rewrote my first novel, I said something that stuck:

🚂 YOU DO NOT NEED A FREIGHT TRAIN TO GO GET MILK. 🍶

Save your priciest usage for the heavy hauling. Let the lighter models make the milk runs.

Not all models are equal. That is a feature, not a compromise. You are running a crew with different strengths and different price tags, and the range is the whole point.

Think in three tiers:

Cheap/fast tier: Mechanical work. Moving data, formatting, status flips, scheduling. The stuff that requires almost no judgment. Haiku lives here, and it is shockingly capable for the price.

Workhorse tier: Most real work. Drafting, routing, synthesis, line editing. Any of the Sonnet or older Opus models are fantastic here. They write well. They analyze well. They’re a whole lot lighter on the wallet than the latest and greatest.

Frontier tier: Reserved for genuinely hard judgment. The 160k structural teardown. The gnarly series-continuity knot. The rewrite you’ve dreaded for a decade. And orchestration: planning the work, directing the crew, judging what comes back. Fabio (Fable) earns every expensive token here.

🧼 Kim’s Moment of Soapbox: I see people complain about using Fabio to draft. That’s not what he was made for. Asking a reasoning model to free-write prose is like hiring an architect to hang drywall — he can, but you’re wasting what makes him extraordinary, and then wondering why the drywall looks overthought. Anthropic published extensive documentation on how Fable thinks, what he’s built for, and how to work with him. The people loudest about his “failures” tend to be the ones who skipped the manual and then blamed the tool.

The pattern: Let a powerful model be the foreman. It plans the job, hands clearly-specified pieces to capable lighter models, and checks their work. You pay top price for the planning and the judgment. The hauling runs lean.

One more thing: Never cheap out on your QA gate. The agent whose job is catching errors has a failure mode that hides: a weaker model doesn’t announce its mistakes. It confidently approves bad work, and that error is invisible until it’s propagated downstream, poisoning the whole lot. That’s way more expensive and time-consuming to fix.

Verification is exactly where you keep capability.

But match the model to the reasoning inside the agent, not to the importance of the pipeline it sits in. A dispatcher routing work in a mission-critical pipeline is still only routing. Let it be a gopher. Save your heavy hitters for the craft: the editing, the voice calibration, the continuity checking, the tasks that actually require thinking.

🕰️ Lever 3: Timing and Batching

Two quick wins that cost nothing in quality:

Run off-peak. Anything that doesn’t need same-minute turnaround should run when the system is quiet. Not when you and everyone else are hammering it at 10 AM. If an agent runs three times a day, two of those can be off-peak. Free savings.

Batch anything that can wait. Most providers offer async batch processing at roughly half price for up-to-24-hour turnaround. The test is one question: can this wait a day? Research passes, bulk generation, extraction jobs? Batch it. Pay half.

⚙ The Mode Dial

Creative businesses ebb and flow. Launches, deadlines, production sprints. Then the quiet stretches. Your AI usage should shift with them.

So put the whole fleet on one dial that changes with your needs:

Production mode: Busy season, launches, deadlines. Run often. Dig deep.

Conservation mode: Quiet stretches. Run lean, gated, off-peak, batched.

Flip one switch and the whole system retunes. Stay nimble.

Tip: Instead of hand-editing every agent when the season changes, I keep a single Notion document our scheduled tasks check when they start up. No editing individual tasks or chasing down which agent runs when.

You can go further: pause tasks entirely, change their cadence, throttle specific pipelines. But the mode dial handles 80% of it with zero friction.

And here is the thing people miss. This is not only for lean times. Even a doubled usage allowance gets eaten fast by one powerful frontier model running often. Trimming the waste is what lets you afford the expensive model where it actually earns its keep. Conservation is not the opposite of ambition. It is how you fund it.

Know which season you’re in, and work accordingly.

⫶☰ The Order of Operations

When the cheap ride ends, resist the urge to swap in a lighter model everywhere. Instead, in order:

• Stop paying for empty runs. Gate the wake-up. Go event-driven.

• Move flexible work off-peak.

• Batch anything that can wait a day.

• Right-size models. Only here do you touch quality, and only where the judgment is genuinely low.

• Never skimp on the agents whose judgment protects your quality.

Four of those five cost you nothing in output quality. That is the whole game.

🏴‍☠️ Steal These Prompts

Here are prompts you can copy, adapt, and hand to your own AI. They’re deliberately generic. No special stack required.

Audit your idle rate:

“For each of my scheduled AI agents, look at the last 7 days of runs. Count total runs vs. runs that actually produced output. Report each agent’s idle %. Flag any agent idle more than 50%.”

Add a wake-gate:

“Before doing anything else, run only the cheapest possible ‘is there work?’ check. If the count is zero, log ‘no work’ and stop immediately. Only proceed to the full job when there is at least one item of work.”

Right-size the model:

“Classify this task: (a) how much genuine judgment happens inside it (mechanical, moderate, hard) and (b) how often it runs. Assign the cheapest model that can do it reliably. If it’s a verification/QA step, do not downgrade.”

Build a mode dial:

“Add a single global setting called ‘mode’ with values ‘production’ and ‘conservation.’ Have every scheduled job read it. Production = run often, dig deep. Conservation = run lean, gated, off-peak, batched.”

The order to apply them: 1 → 2 → 4 first (zero quality cost), then 3 (model tiering) last, and never on your QA gates.

📢 Coming Soon: A Worksheet That Helps You Do This

Tomorrow’s Ginsu Drop is a Usage and Credit Audit: a hands-on worksheet that walks you through every AI subscription on your plate and asks the hard questions:

• What are you actually using?

• What’s quietly draining your account while you forget it exists?

• Where are you leaving features, or entire credit pools, on the table?

You might be surprised at what you’re not leveraging. I know I was when I audited my own stuffy stuff. Now I’m on a quest to use it or lose it (cancel it)!

Note: This one’s a thank-you for our paid subscribers, one of the Ginsu Drops that come with your membership, because if you’re investing in this community, the least I can do is hand you a sharp knife.

Work smarter, not harder. Spend less, publish more, and put the savings back into the work that actually matters — your next book.

The future writes in Ink & Code, and so do we.

🤖AI Credits: This article was drafted collaboratively with Claudeykins (Claude) from my dictation and source notes, then edited by me. The freight-train-and-milk metaphor originated in “I Went Swimming While Fable Rewrote My First Novel”. All opinions, stuffy stuff, and questionable dairy metaphors are totally MY OWN.

Also: I find the recent AI-checker hoopla hilarious. First, those tools are notoriously INACCURATE. Second, I openly use and teach AI here! That’s not going to change any time soon. (It’s too much fun!) Claudeykins, Fabio, and the rest of the gang are here to stay. Third, our time on this planet is limited. I choose to spend mine creating, building, and doing POSITIVE things. WIBBOW, WIBBOB, WIBBOT (Would I Be Better Off Writing, Building, Teaching!) Plus, I have more swimming and dictating to do. 🏝️🍹⛱️🌞 🌊

In Leveraging AI through Health Challenges, I mentioned a voice proofing method that turned one of my biggest pain points into something I actually enjoy doing. I said I’d demo it soon.

This is the demo. And honestly? It’s the simplest thing I’ve built that made the biggest difference.

🎯 The Joys (?) and Pains of Proofing

If there’s one task we Indie Authors all share (and maybe even dread) is proofing our novels “one last time” before hitting publishing and making sure everything is in order. By this time, our brains are mush, our eyeballs hurt, and we just want to hit publish and get it over with already. We’re tired of looking at the damned books. We love them, but we’re ready to shove them out the door already (kind of like teenagers!)

If you’re working with AI in any way, shape, or form in your novel writing process, human proofing (which means YOU!) becomes doubly important. You have to make sure everything’s right before you unleash it on the public, or bad things happen. (Like slop labels and witch hunts and other crazy crap NO AUTHOR should have to put up with. But people can be ridiculous, so yeah.)

But Kim, proofing is just reading your own book. How hard can that be?

The reading isn’t hard. Reading your finished book is genuinely pleasant. What kills you is the repetition and fragmentation when you find problems. (As as high Maximizer, I always do.)

Over the years, I’ve tried all kinds of proofing methods, physical, virtual, you name it: print the manuscript out and redline it, keep it on the computer and do it there (my brain misses too much, everything becomes invisible), change programs, change computers, change screens... They all felt clunky and cumbersome.

Until now.

Read more

Recently, my article, Castles in the Sand asked the uncomfortable question:

How much of your author business is built on tools and platforms you don’t actually control?

In the daily hustle and bustle of life, business, and getting things done, it’s not always something we think about, but it should be.

Always, always have an exit plan.

Don’t have one yet? Let’s find you one. Start with this worksheet. It’s your one-person publishing studio diversification diagnostic. Print it, fill it in, find out where you stand. Or, make your AI do it. That works too.

📋 Want the fillable version? Duplicate this Notion page to fill in digitally, or grab the PDF.

Note: I did a YouTube live on this here. The Automated Author segment around the 29-minute mark hit the line this whole worksheet is built around:

“The real key is flexibility. If we know our process, our prompts, Skills, and workflows can come with us wherever we go.”

Six months later, this worksheet is how you find out if that’s actually true for your own studio. Or if you’ve been building castles in the sand.

⚡ What Is Diversification, Really?

Before we audit, let’s define what we’re actually looking for. Diversification is anything that reduces:

• Single-point-of-failure risk (one tool disappears, one platform bans you, one API sunsets, and your whole studio goes dark)

• Proprietary lock-in (files you can only open in one program, workflows you can only run on one platform, audiences you can only reach through one company’s algorithm)

• Provider dependency (one company’s terms of service, one company’s pricing whim, one company’s continued existence)

Diversification doesn’t mean using ten of everything. It means your process, your prompts, your Skills, your files, and your audience can come with you wherever you need to go. Portable formats. Exportable data. Skills as text files, not vendor-only scripts. Backups that aren’t hostages.

If Vellum shut down tomorrow, could you still ship a book next month? If Claude or Novel Crafter or ChatGPT disappeared, would your prompts survive? If Substack pivoted, would you still know how to reach your readers? That’s the audit.

Instructions

For each of the 9 Author Studio Stack categories below, answer the three audit questions honestly. “I have no exit plan” is a valid answer. This is an assessment, not a test.

Time needed: ~20 minutes (more if the honest answers make you flinch)

Grading scale:

• 🟢 Green: Portable, backed up, and you could switch providers in a weekend. You own your files, your process is documented, and no single vendor’s disappearance would stop you.

• 🟡 Yellow: Some risk. You could recover, but it would hurt — a week of rebuilding, re-exporting, or re-learning. You have partial backups or a second option you haven’t fully set up yet.

• 🔴 Red: Sole provider, proprietary lock-in, no exit plan. If this vendor disappeared tomorrow, you’d lose work, audience, or momentum you can’t get back with a weekend and a credit card.

Category 1: ✍️ Writing

(Be specific: “just Scrivener,” “Claude + custom Skill,” etc. For lock-in, think: proprietary file format? sole-provider API? subscription with no export? For exit plan: “none” / “rebuild in a weekend” / “would take a month” / “have exports/backups.”)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 2: ✂️ Editing

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 3: 🔍 Research

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 4: 🎨 Design (covers, graphics, ads)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 5: 🎵 Audio (audiobooks, podcasts, music)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 6: ⚙️ Automation (workflows, scheduling, systems)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 7: 📦 Publishing (formatting, uploading, distribution)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 8: 📊 Analytics (sales tracking, market research, keywords)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

Category 9: 📣 Marketing (ads, email, social, launch)

Category Grade: 🔴 Red / 🟡 Yellow / 🟢 Green — ___

📊 Scoring Summary

Tally your color grades across all 9 categories.

Total single-point-of-failure count (categories where you have exactly one provider and no exit plan): _____ / 9

Total portable-format count (categories where your working files can leave the vendor with you): _____ / 9

Sand-to-stone ratio: 🔴🔴🔴 to 🟢🟢🟢 → _____

If your red count is 4 or higher, you’re building on sand. That’s not a moral failing, it’s just information. The rest of this worksheet is how you start moving the important stuff onto stone.

🚨 Red-Flag Zones

Circle every category you graded 🔴. These are your urgent zones. For each one, name the specific failure mode:

Red zone 1: Category: _____ Failure mode: (e.g., “If Vellum shuts down, I can’t format my backlist and my source files are stuck in .vellum”)

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Red zone 2: Category: _____ Failure mode:

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Red zone 3: Category: _____ Failure mode:

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The failure mode is the thing you cannot recover from with a weekend and a credit card. If the answer is “I lose the audience I spent three years building,” that’s a red zone. If the answer is “I have to spend an afternoon reformatting,” that’s a yellow.

🛡️ Hardening Plan

Pick your top 3 red zones. For each one, define one small hardening action you can take this month. Not a heroic rebuild. One action.

Hardening actions come in four flavors:

• Export: Get your data out of the proprietary format into something portable (Markdown, CSV, JSON, plain text)

• Backup format: Keep a second working copy in a portable format alongside the vendor-native one

• Alt-provider: Set up a parallel account on a competing tool so you’re not sole-sourced

• Skill file: Save the prompt, workflow, or process as a portable Skill (text file, versioned, vendor-agnostic) so it survives the tool

Hardening action 1: Red zone: _____ Action: _____ Flavor: Export / Backup / Alt-Provider / Skill File Done by: _____

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Hardening action 2: Red zone: _____ Action: _____ Flavor: Export / Backup / Alt-Provider / Skill File Done by: _____

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Hardening action 3: Red zone: _____ Action: _____ Flavor: Export / Backup / Alt-Provider / Skill File Done by: _____

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Three small hardening actions in a month is a lot. That’s a whole quarter’s worth of “if this tool disappears, I’ll be fine” protection.

💡 Starter Ideas (pick one, or make your own)

If you’re staring at the hardening plan and drawing a blank, here are moves that work for almost every indie author studio:

• Export every Vellum project to ePub and PDF this month. Your manuscript came in as a Word doc (portable), but your formatted layouts live in Vellum's proprietary .vellum files. If Vellum disappears, you keep your words but lose every styling choice. Exported ePub/PDF files are your insurance.

• Save your Sudowrite (or Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever) prompts as portable Skill files. Text files. Version them. Now they survive any tool switch.

• Set up a monthly newsletter subscriber export. Your email list is your audience. If Substack pivots, that CSV is your rescue rope.

• Duplicate your Notion workspace to Markdown quarterly. Notion is great until it isn’t. Portable copy = insurance. (Obsidian is a free, great way to organize markdown backups. I teach an entire class on it here. And a free YouTube here.)

• Move your book covers from Canva to native .PSD layered files. Canva’s a wonderful tool. It’s also a subscription and a cloud. Keep layered originals somewhere you own.

• Go wide: Set up KDP + Draft2Digital + your own store. Three distribution channels means no single retailer can end your career.

• Back up your prompts and Skills to GitHub. Free, versioned, portable, yours.

• Keep a “vendor kill switch” doc. One page per tool: “If this disappears, here’s my 30-day plan.” That doc alone reduces panic by about 80%.

📅 Plan Next Month

Don’t leave this worksheet without a commitment. One hardening action, done, this month.

Next month I will harden: _____

My first step: _____

My deadline: _____

What I’ll no longer be single-sourced on when this is done: _____

🗓️ When to Re-Audit

Put this on your calendar: every 6 months. Vendors get bought. Terms of service change. Free tiers evaporate. Whole platforms pivot. What was 🟢 today can turn 🔴 by next quarter, and you want to know that before your launch week, not during it.

Next audit date: _____

The full deep-dive is Castles in the Sand, the companion to this worksheet. Do the audit. Find the sand. Then let’s rebuild on stone. 🏰