Note: Indie Author Magazine and Indie Author Training are sister organizations.
Indie authors buy courses and sit through webinars, yet much of what they learn never reaches their business. IAM publisher Chelle Honiker hears that complaint often. On the August 27 episode of Self Publishing Insiders, Draft2Digital's livestream and podcast, she told host Jim Azevedo that the problem has shaped Indie Author Training (IAT) from the start.
"People were taking a lot of courses, learning a lot of things, or buying a lot of courses but not finding time to implement those things," Honiker said.
With IAT’s latest ventures, including monthly virtual summits and a virtual assistant built into the platform, Honiker hopes to shift that trend.
An Idea From Author Nation
The idea for IAT was born during the first Author Nation, in 2024, Honiker said. Course creators were building programs on Teachable, Thinkific, and Skool, and then doing the "heavy lift" of finding students on their own. Honiker’s plan was to put instructors and learners in one place. "What if we brought everybody under one big tent?" she said.
In practice, it did not go as planned. IAT talked to 105 instructors, but most were too busy to bring their courses over to the platform. Honiker saw that as typical of the industry, though she understood why; authors were writing and publishing, and any other tasks competed for the same hours.
Honiker spent two years as Author Nation's programming director before Jen Green took over the role this year, and she said the same challenge shaped her work for the conference. As program director, Honiker often considered how authors would implement lessons from the conference in their businesses when organizing the event schedule for Author Nation. Today, her goal for IAT is to keep education from becoming one more thing authors have to add to their to-do list.
Choosing What to Learn
"I don't think we suffer from a lack of education or opportunities for education," Honiker clarifies. The challenge for authors is, first, choosing among them "so that we're listening to a signal instead of just noise," she said. Then, they have to find time to do the work once a course is finished. A webinar leads to notes, the notes lead to a to-do list, and the list requires time to implement—but that’s time an author may not have.
In the podcast interview, Honiker offered going wide as her example, with retailers, formats, and translations each needing research before anything changes. "I already have this tsunami of things that I have to do every week,” she said. “How do I fit that one more thing in?"
When IAT informally surveyed its audience, users suggested time was one of their biggest blockers. "It is tough to carve out that time to do it," Honiker said.
IAT's response is a series of short summits, each on a single subject, which Honiker described as micro-learning events. The Wide for the Win Summit, held October 9 and 10, was a testing ground that set the precedent for future events, with day 1 offering free sessions for authors curious about a topic, and day 2 offering paid workshops that showed how to do it. Honiker hoped that the two-day format and option to implement speakers’ suggestions as part of the event would prevent authors from feeling overwhelmed.
A webinar leads to notes, the notes lead to a to-do list, and the list requires time to implement—but that’s time an author may not have.
In total, the summit saw more than six hundred register, with more signing up to access replays of the thirty-five sessions that spanned both days of the event.
The next summit, on AI technology options for indie authors, runs November 20 and 21 and is open for sign-ups now at https://summits.indieauthortraining.com/ai-tech. More topics are planned through June of next year, with December’s summit focusing on health and wellness and January kicking off discussions about audiobooks. Although the themes of each event differ, the general two-day structure will stay the same, as will access to replays—which Honiker hopes will allow even more authors to benefit from the sessions.
Putting Transcripts to Work
The other half of IAT's latest approach to helping educate authors incorporates AI. IAT's weekly webinars already come with transcripts, and for those who opt in, a built-in assistant available through ChatGPT and Claude can connect those transcripts, summit sessions, purchased courses, and public IAM articles to the user’s own AI. The author can then ask how a session applies to their own catalog, or how much work it would take to put in place.
She suggested picking one problem first, such as Facebook ads, and telling the AI how much time you have, with a prompt along the lines of "I'm overwhelmed. I don't have a lot of time. What are two things I can do today to move the needle based on this information that I've just learned or based on this transcript that I've just given you?"
If the answer comes back too dense, ask again. “You don't have to be embarrassed if you don't understand what an LLM gives you back," she said.
Authors with a backlog of unfinished courses can do something similar on their own, Honiker says. With an IAT course creator's permission, an author can add a course's transcripts to their own AI and ask how to apply them. "That is the course creator's IP, so please be sure that you're respecting that," Honiker said.
Authors also aren’t required to use AI in the IAT platform. IAT, as with its sister sites, remains neutral about the use of AI in authors’ businesses. Although the platform examines certain AI tools from an educational standpoint, the decision about whether to use them is always left to the individual, Honiker says.
Deciding What to Keep
In his interview with Honiker, Azevedo asked whether AI-powered education could leave authors good at asking AI what to do but short on the skills underneath. "I think that's the danger with AI in all capacities, right?” Honiker said. “But I also think it comes back to, ‘What do you love to do?’ And that should be fiercely protected.” For one creator, she explained, that is writing; for another, it is designing covers or drawing.
Honiker admits that in her own business, she is glad to hand off social media. But she also encourages authors to ensure they understand how each part of their business operates. For new or unfamiliar tasks, such as Facebook ads, her advice was to learn the tool first, at least to understand how it works. "Then you can decide if you want to outsource it or if you want to keep it," she said.
During the live stream, a viewer asked whether authors need AI to keep up with marketing. "I would say do you need to use it? No," Honiker said. She described having her assistant research platform changes and comparable authors before drafting a campaign, with the final decision left to her. "I can utilize AI for the parts that are time-consuming, tedious, stupid work, busy work, and then just do the part that makes sense." At IAM, she noted as an example, "all of our articles are written and edited by humans," and AI handles the publishing schedule after that.
She also acknowledged the concerns some authors have about the tools. "I'm very aware of AI as an issue in our industry," she said, and added that "it's incumbent upon all of us to decide how we want to incorporate AI into our business or if we want to incorporate AI into our business." For authors whose objections relate to their books training AI, she explained that most popular AI tools are already trained; instead, the concerns around copyrighted work relate to indexing, the live information AI tools draw on to answer questions about books. "And most retailers, if you read the terms of service, you are giving them the right to index your book by publishing it.”
“I wish it were a case where that were not so, and we were paid for indexing or training, but we are not,” Honiker said. “So the broader conversation, I hope, will start to shift to, ‘Given those realities, how am I going to protect myself, protect my intellectual property, protect my copyright, and market myself better so that that doesn't become an issue?’”
“It's incumbent upon all of us to decide how we want to incorporate AI into our business or if we want to incorporate AI into our business.”
—IAT founder Chelle Honiker
To authors who feel they have arrived too late, she said she feels the same. "I wake up feeling behind on AI, and I'm in it all day, every day," Honiker said. Her advice to authors, whether curious or concerned, was to start learning more.
"Think about it,” she said. “Make informed decisions about how you want to use it."
Relationships Still Matter Most
As AI becomes capable of taking over more of the administrative tasks behind publishing, Honiker said skills like reasoning and relatability will become even more important for authors to develop. "Building relationships is the biggest one," she said—with peers and readers.
She acknowledged that AI-written books have made discovery harder, but her solution is for authors to lean even more into supporting one another. “When you have a relationship with your reader, and when you have relationships with other authors that can then recommend your book and recommend things to their readers, you create this flywheel where you're creating readers inside of readers … [and] you're not going to suffer for discoverability,” Honiker said. “It is the superpower that you can embrace.”
Honiker’s full interview with Azevedo is available on Draft2Digital's YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZL6SSUQMByo and on the Self Publishing Insiders podcast, in the episode “Author Training in the Age of AI.”
