I've been publishing Indie Author Magazine for five years now, and in that time we've covered every major shift in this industry — wide distribution, direct sales, KU page-read changes, TikTok, the rise (and occasional fall) of tools and services (Hey, remember Kindle Vella?) Our job has always been to tell you what's happening, explain what it means, and let you decide what to do with it.
I'm not here to tell you that you need to use AI. That hasn't changed, and it won't.
But something did change this year that I think is worth understanding, whether you end up using it or not. And I'd rather you hear it from me — with context — than stumble into it through a breathless post on X/Twitter or a YouTube thumbnail with someone pointing at a robot.
For the past two years, AI in the author world has mostly meant one thing: chatting. You open ChatGPT, you ask it to help with a blurb or brainstorm a title, you copy the result, you paste it somewhere. That's useful, and plenty of authors have found real value there. Others tried it, decided it wasn't for them, and moved on. Both of those are completely valid responses.
What's different now is a category called agentic AI. Instead of answering questions and waiting for you to do something with the answer, these tools connect to your actual accounts — your email, your file storage, your website, your newsletter platform — and take action. Not autonomously (you're still directing it), but independently. You tell it what to do and it goes and does it.
I'll be specific about what that looks like in practice, because vague descriptions of AI capabilities are how we got into the hype mess in the first place:
I have an AI assistant connected to six email accounts. It triages my inbox daily — flags urgent items, drafts responses to routine messages, archives the noise, and creates tasks in Notion from anything that needs follow-up. I went from thousands of unread messages to inbox zero in a weekend, and it's stayed that way.
At the end of each day, it sweeps my meeting notes (I use Granola) and drafts replies that need sending, and adds task to Notion for everything I've already forgotten.
I write one newsletter per week over on Author Automations. From that single piece, my system generates social content for thirteen platforms, a YouTube video, and a podcast episode. I review it, approve it, and it posts. The manual version of that workflow used to take me 8–10 hours. Now it takes about 45 minutes of review time.
My WordPress site(s) get plugin updates, content changes, and basic troubleshooting handled without me logging into a single dashboard. I migrated a site from Wix to WordPress in 2 hours. I've added new pages, updated my site for SEO (and indexing by LLMs) and built entire sites using my phone's Telegram chat app.
I'm not sharing this to impress you. I'm sharing it because this is the kind of shift we'd cover in the magazine regardless of whether I was personally involved — and I think you deserve a clear-eyed look at what's actually possible right now, minus the hype.
Here's what I want to be honest about:
This isn't for everyone, and it doesn't need to be. If your current systems work and you're happy with how you spend your time, there is zero reason to change anything. "It's working" is a perfectly good answer.
The learning curve is real. I've spent months building these systems, and I have a technical background that made some of it easier. I won't pretend you'll replicate my setup in an afternoon.
AI still gets things wrong. Every piece of content it generates goes through my eyes before it goes anywhere. Humans in the loop isn't a marketing phrase for me — it's the whole philosophy.
And the ethical questions around AI in publishing are ongoing and important. We cover those in the magazine, and we'll keep covering them.
All of that said: if you're curious about what this looks like in practice, I'm running a virtual summit on April 21–22 called AI for Your Author Business. Day 1 is free. I open my actual accounts, build workflows live on screen, and you can set up your own versions during the sessions. If it's useful, great. If you come away thinking "interesting, but not for me right now," that's a perfectly good outcome too.
The summit isn't an IAM event — it's through Indie Author Training, and I want to be transparent about that. I'm mentioning it here because I've been asked to speak at conferences, and on podcasts, and enough of you have asked me about this stuff that I'd rather point you to a structured walkthrough than try to answer it piecemeal in DMs.
Day 1: Free (AI copywriting, Airtable publishing template, social media automation, generative images and video)
Day 2: $97 early bird (agentic AI — Claude Code, MCP connections, email management, newsletter automation, WordPress management, content repurposing)
Our commitment at IAM hasn't changed: we cover what matters to your business, we give you the information, and we trust you to make your own decisions. This is no different.
Chelle Honiker
Publisher, Indie Author Magazine