Vertical Drama Results & What I'm Doing Right Now!

A massive catch-up post from Cassie. Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers, with links cleaned up for the studio journal.

Oh my God, I could not be HAPPIER about the results from posting the first two episodes of my vertical drama up!

I did it as a trial reel, a reel-reel, and also a TikTok, and it’s got 16,000 organic views between them.

I know, I know, a lot of people pop off and go WAY more viral than that a lot of the time, but I don’t - and doing this three-book series as a vertical drama is gonna give me probably upwards of 1000 videos with which to funnel people in?

In…28 languages????

Not to mention I have five other series we could do????

HA!

What I like about the background stats for the main one is the strong push to my non-followers - and there are another 60 followers from the trial reel too!

‘Cause for a while now there’s been peeps who’ve gone out of their way to “warn” my new subscribers that I use AI.

Whelp, all these new readers are here for the AI - and because they want more AI.

Muhahaha!

I’m just so thrilled!!!

Plus also? I had someone ask in Portuguese where more episodes were, and I got to tell her back that they’re coming out every Tues & Thurs, but that she could buy Portuguese copies on my store, because it’s true!!!!

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So, what am I up to now?

Well - I’ve got a sesh of Codex working on “saucing” these videos for being posted on YouTube and what not.

I had Codex create 28 language-specific YouTube channels for me the other night, but I was still worried about these getting hit with unoriginal content violations, because while the subtitles are burned in differently, the videos behind them are largely the same.

So the sauce = an FFmpeg program that does a bunch of small tweaks to things that changes the metadata and the video itself in ways that don’t register to human eyes, but that do register as meaningfully different to computers.

It can’t guarantee perfection, but it can probably do pretty damn good? And I’m’n’a take that to the bank for now. I also have ideas for other structural changes that will be Different Enough to count.

Annnnddd here - I turned The Sauce into a locally hosted thing on my computer. I’ll pop the zip for it behind the paywall on the Substack post, so anyone who is a paid subscriber can repurpose it for their own needs. It uses Python and FFmpeg, but I suspect at this point so do most of you ;)

Other things I want to do today:

• Create episode pages per language on my store, because the more in-house capture and AEO/SEO stuff I can do the better - and when I send people to watch episodes from my newsletters, I’d rather have them going to my store than YouTube!
• Create Facebook ads in all the languages I can. I already created and translated my ad texts. I won’t lie, this one I’m a leeeetle anxious about, BUT…it’s super time to see wtf is gonna happen!
• Harvest my Kobo and Google Play URLs to send people to, because many of the languages I’m in are not even on Amazon properly, but we’re just gonna effing try :D.
• Entirely revamp Athena, which I hadn’t been using anyhow, since I’ve been outta the Facebook ads game for a good few months here.

But now that I will have this stream of at least two episodes a week to use for ads, it seems like I ought to do that, plus keep going.

I’m also gonna do some work for the Chinese market in particular, and get that ready to roll. I am reallllllly curious to see how/what/if anything will happen there :D.

Oh, and!

Plenty of subscribers have been kicking Project Arachne’s tires, and submitting requests! Luckily not bug requests, THANK THE LORD, but mostly just “huh, what if it also did X?” and so far I’ve been able to accommodate them!

And after my shift two nights ago, I went through the process of making the “Cassie can accept money for her coding efforts” live!

It’ll be $50/book for setup, and then after that you can translate your books into all the available languages with your own API keys to your heart’s content! Or, you can just subscribe to the Substack for $50/mo, and get your first 50 books remembered for free, and go crazy.

We’ll be letting people in off the waitlist slowly, just so that I make sure my virtual server can handle the load. Plus also, me, emotionally, letting this, my first baby software, fly! lol.

But I’m really excited to share it!!! So if you want to get on the waitlist, please do so!

At some point in time, I will make a video showing how to use Arachne, but today is not that day, nor is that week this week, lol.

Other things I’ve done: bought more RAM and a 4 TB drive for my main machine, because I have other apps I want to create on deck that’ll take up a lot of space while testing.

Eh, I might as well tell you - especially because the story’s fun - I was working super hard on creating the audio for Mercury, my ten-minute-long film, and automating that, last year, when I realized that the same work I was doing for that could theoretically be used to take the spice out of audiobooks, and make them PG-13 for YouTube.

So I bought the domain name and I worked on making the app, but it was still a little bit beyond my reach at the time. Plus I couldn’t figure out how to outsource it because I didn’t understand how virtual servers worked then.

Also, I figured I shouldn’t “invent” software that other people would be able to reverse engineer fairly quickly?

Then, I learned, through painful experience, that most people don’t enjoy creating their own software, like I do, LOL.

Anyhow - domain registrars decided that all .ai web addresses should cost $80 a year soon…so I hopped in a few months ago and decided I’d let that domain go…

Until I got all this experience bringing Project Arachne to life, and realized that making software was my FAVORITE THING, lol.

So here you go:

Unspice.ai - you can hop on the waitlist now! I’ll probably have this project finished by the end of June, it’s scoped pretty well.

Please also witness my tiny chili pepper favicon, LOL.

Heehee.

It’s funny that I had the context to bring Mercury up here, because it was made entirely with Midjourney before character consistency was really possible, with voices by ElevenLabs. I was really pleased with how well it held up, even though it’s almost a year old, which is FOREVER in AI time.

And - yeah - other stuff on deck:

Getting my other girl in the PL to do some Facebook management for me, finally setting up my TEMU store (finally, finally, this is, perhaps, the oldest ToDo item on my ToDo list), and I dunno, like five million other things.

But I’ve got my trusty AI buddies with me to help me do them, so it’s time to start rocking things out!

xoxo!

Cassie

PS: The Video Saucer is behind the paywall on the Substack version of this post.