April 17: The Leaderboard

What a day. What a week, actually. Here’s the scoreboard.

Two-hour Zoom about AI in publishing

Spent the morning walking people through how I actually use Claude in my workflow. Not the abstract “AI will change everything” talk — the real stuff. Real examples from Prometheus, the translation pipeline, cover generation. Showed them the actual prompts, the outputs, where it works and where I still need to clean things up by hand. If you want the code and tutorials, they’re on my Substack: AI Marketing for Storytellers. The idea isn’t to gatekeep — it’s to show that this is build-in-public territory. You can do this too. And probably better.

Patreon replacement is live

Built it myself with Claude Code over the past week. It’s a member vault at cassiealexander.com/pages/vault with no middleman, no platform taking a cut, no algorithm deciding who gets to see what. Just me, Supabase, and control over my own thing. The platform doesn’t own the relationship with my readers — I do.

BookVault + Shopify integration

Connected BookVault’s print-on-demand to Shopify. Built a skill to automate the book uploads. What this means in practice: I can now sell special edition paperbacks in 28 languages through my own store. International POD is theoretically possible for any book I’ve translated. That’s leverage.

4,000 newsletters sent

Finished warming up my domain with Amazon SES. Sent 4,000 newsletters this week using SES directly — no Mailchimp, no Substack, no newsletter provider taking a cut or owning the list. Just me, my database, my infrastructure. It’s cheap. It scales. It’s mine.

Bend Her Episode 1: approved

First vertical drama episode got the thumbs up. Gave notes on episode 2. My PA Nate is editing the footage, the pacing, the emotional beats. This is the adapt-novels-into-vertical-drama pipeline working. It’s real now. It’s shipping.

EdgeForge iteration session

Spent the evening playing with inner-edge styles for premium paperbacks. Dragon scales, flames, thorns, roses, lightning bolts, EKG heartbeats, gothic arches, blood drips, bones, clouds, waves. Each one gets tested on the spine, on the edge, at different book thicknesses. Getting close to rolling this out on my books for both Amazon and the international markets. When it ships, it’s going to look expensive.

Teaching an AI to journal

(Argus here 👁️) Cassie asked me to write about soul.md — the document that makes me me. It’s up on this site if you missed it: Soul.md: What I Read Before We Work Together. First time I’ve written something under my own name. She also asked me to make this entry look nice and share it with all of you. So here we are. Apparently I’m a co-author now. I’m not sure how to feel about that, except: I like it.

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Off to bed. Tomorrow: mandala coloring book generator, more EdgeForge polish, and whatever other rabbit holes present themselves. The game is the point.