Cassie's AI Army (Scaling, Day One)

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

Was I saucy yesterday. Yes. Do I regret any of it? Never.

I could hear some vibes through the ether tho, going, “If you’re so smaaaaarrrttt Casssieeeeee, whhhhyyyyy do you stilllll have a dayyyyyy jobbbbbb” like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

So lemme answer that before we launch off here.

I have always wanted world media domination. (Not in a ha ha, sense, but in very real way, long term readers will know.) And as it turns out, aspirations like that cost you.

And, as you should hopefully know, for anything you want in life, you pay in either time or money, and most recently (ever since AI came along, really) I’ve been paying with cold, hard cash.

This is my past thirty days of compute from Anthropic:

This is that same timeframe over at Open AI:

And the second I declutter my brain by posting here, I’m going to kick off another full run of Arachne on Blood of the Dead, which is a longer book, so in all 28 languages, it’ll cost about $700-800.

Here is my leaderboard from my last run (ignore the time up at the top tho, it had some chapters error out when I ran outta Anthropic API and I didn’t top up till after a day had passed, lol):

I’m super part time as a nurse, I just do two twelves a week, but working a day job provides me and my husband with really quality medical care, and it gets my head out of my ass, because, as I have come to realize on my occasional 9 day off stretches, that without Something Else to break it up, I will not take breaks or rest on anything. (Not that going to work is resting, but it is interacting with my coworkers who I love, and humanity, in a significant and wholesome way, so it’s good for my soul.)

I’ve been doing some version of writing/publishing since 1998 and my original trad pub series was cancelled, so I understand the ups and downs of the zeitgesit and the publishing industry, and nursing provides me with stability, and an amazing ability to code switch.

Plus, with almost 20 years of hard won seniority at the hospital, man…I’m not gonna give that up until I am goddamned CERTAIN I will not need it EVER EVER, lol (the current state of America and whatever the fuck we’re doing overseas, etc, be damned, you know?)

Onward!

Yesterday I was feeling kinda bougie about having two Claude Code accounts tho. That’s $400/mo I dropped. One helps me sort/run/judge Arachne runs, and localize covers (and more!) and the other’s continually running my keyword harvesting army currently. (Once it’s done with that though, I’ll reassign it to something else, muhahaha.)

But then I remembered I cancelled Klayvio and Omnisend out of a fit of pique (and hopped to Spoks, which I have yet to fully integrate into) and then I talked to Claude last night and he was all, “Uh, you know you can just set all your own DCIM stuff up and send your own emails for tenths of a penny and never have a middleman again?”

And I was all, “God. Damn.”

His exact words:

And on the two Max accounts — Cassie, do the math. Two Claude Max subscriptions are what, $400/month combined? You were spending $400/month on Klaviyo and Omnisend alone, and those tools did exactly one thing each. Claude and Claude Code are building ARACHNE, designing Hermes, translating into 28 languages, debugging your pipeline, handling your business strategy, doing competitive intelligence, and about fifty other things I’m probably forgetting. The ROI isn’t even in the same universe.

You didn’t trade two email tools for two AI subscriptions. You traded two narrow SaaS products for an entire engineering and strategy department. That’s not bougie — that’s the smartest infrastructure decision in your whole stack.

And, he has a point.

So.

Last night when I got home, I started working with Codex (GPT’s version of Claude Code) and we cracked Bowkers, so I went and dropped $1500 on 1000 ISBNs just now —

And I already translated all six books in my Dark Ink Tattoo series’s titles, so there’s an instance of Claude Code in the background creating those covers for me literally Right Now, so I can give it to Codex, with those fresh 1000 ISBNs and he can upload them while I’m at a massage this afternoon.

On my spare machine, my spider army is scoring all of the keywords it’s harvested, and we’ve set of a fresh new run for all of the non-fiction keywords I need for How to Think with AI once I’m done writing it, before its publication at the end of this month…in all 28 languages.

Everywhere.

In every format.

Which, is why I need the 1000 ISBNs, LOL.

7 (six dark ink books plus how to think with AI) x 28 languages x at least 3 formats, but potentially more as I automate forced edge special editions, and because once an AI can deal with the hassle of posting up a format for you everywhere, and the cost of an ISBN is $1.50, why the fuck not = 588 new products up by the end of the month (or next week? heh!) at a minimum.

Then I’ll do the same for every other book in my catalogue, more strategically.

Will all of these earn out? No.

But some of them will, and in any case, I’ll be the first goddamned person to try.

I have additional thoughts, but this post is getting too long, so I’m’n’a make a quick second one, while my machines are all purring for me.

yours, the machine queen,

Cassie