PROJECT ARACHNE IS OPEN

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

So I got my first real review of a Project Arachne translated book this morning on Google Play!!!

Do you know what that means?!?!?!

BEAUTIFULLY SUSPENSEFUL.

It’s for Bend Her and YES YES YES YES YES!!!!

I’m not fucking insane and I haven’t wasted thousands of hours of my life, THANK GOD.

(The cost of living at the edge is ignoring your self-doubt until you conquer something and then you get to see it all rush past you, doppler effect style, heh!)

I’ve been really anxious about things — understandably, right? ‘Cause we’re pushing seven months of my coding life and five figures of test compute — but now?

It’s all gonna be worth while.

I’m running low key ads in a ton of smaller langs right now, for just $2/day, and don’t get too excited by that tall column, that represents a whopping 20 dollar day, but then I had to turn my ads off and fix my epubs, get them out to all the vendors again, then start my ads again — and Google Play reports weird, so it’s only up thru June 7th so far — but —

BUT —

Since each of these books only cost me like $40 to run, if each one makes me $40 per language, I’ll be square.

I won’t really know wtf is happening at Kobo — if anything! — for a month, ‘cause they don’t report their KU-style minutes/read monies till a month after the fact, yeehaw.

BUT.

Things worked.

(I’m not crazy.)

Thank GOD.

And luckily my baller team of beta people have been AMAZING, and we’ve caught so many thrilling edge cases and hassles — but I’m proud to say that when Arachne fails (which is rarely, but sometimes, she does!) she fails loudly and complains, and so no one’s gonna get a half-assed translation that drifted off somewhere or missed a bit or anything.

I even asked Fable about a ton of translations this morning — because I could, and I test obsessively — here’s his thoughts on Dutch, he hit up three heavy scenes.

Now, I won’t say everything Arachne does is perfect.

There’s a reason why people only get markdown files at the end — I want you to GIVE THOSE to an AI of your choosing, and say, “Hey, bro, think about this.”

For instance, I have twins in my Dragon books, and in Chinese, siblings always have to be older or younger, and I made the mistake (me, personally, not knowing that was a thing) of not taking that into account in my project intake documents.

Which meant that Arachne winged it.

At the end, during the review phase (because it surfaces Important Questions It Has to the author for final thoughts) it asked me ‘WTH?’ ‘cause sometimes the translated chunks contradicted each other — it didn’t catch everything (bc, frankly, there was Too Much) — but I was easily able to knock it out with Opus.

You’re always going to want a second set of eyes, because NO AI TRANSLATION IS PERFECT.

So you turning your MD files into ePubs (which is something any AI can do for you!) is a good time to double check anything! <3

BUT.

Here’s the thing.

Arachne cares.

It tries as hard as it can.

It asks all the right questions and sets your files up all the way correctly, as correctly as it can, and asks for your input before it revs off and it just wants to make the best possible book ever for you, always.

And then?

Afterwards?

It remembers things.

All the lessons it learned while it was translating your book, the choices you picked, and how your voice profiles and glossary and cannon facts worked, and it uses them for books that continue on in that same series.

And that’s really what you’re paying for, when you pay me, the $50 per book it costs to set things up — all of the magical coding I’ve been working so hard on, AND, the fact that I’m going to keep all of that for you, for when you add extra books, AND —

once you’ve set up a book in Arachne, everything else is on you and up to you.

You bring your own keys.

• All the tokens are just market cost.

• No subscriptions you can forget or waste.

• No mark-up.

• No middleman between you and the providers.

Just a service you can come back to over time, test out new languages on a lark with, or get everything done all at once, in all the languages we serve, happily.

Everything else is up to you and your imagination.

I am SO HAPPY!

xoxo!

Cassie

PS: and if you’re a paid subscriber over here, lmk your email so I can get you grandfathered in!