Project Arachne Private Beta for Subscribers

so get in while the getting is good!

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

If you’re a subscriber, you’re going to get BYOK access to Project Arachne, my translation engine, the one that’s been responsible for me posting up nine books in 28 languages this past week, this upcoming Friday — me showing how to use it will be the bulk of the call. (I am, however, creating an agent to help people go through it livetime, because I care and because I can.)

Here’s how it’s going to go down:

I HIGHLY suggest you set up an account at Privacy.com — it allows you to make project or vendor specific credit cards, branched off of your own or a bank account, which you can then limit to whatever fee structure you might like. What this means in practice is that you will only spend X amount that you intend to on translations, rather than going over, if you cannot afford to.

BYOK stands for Bring Your Own Key, which refers to an API key, which you’ll be getting via Open AI and Anthropic. In this house we only use frontier models. There is no point in asking a lesser model to do a complicated translation. We are going for quality, and quality alone.

That said, though, this is still AI translation. At the end of this project you will be receiving .md files of your book/s. It is (currently, though that will change) your responsibility to turn them into epubs, something any AI can do. You will also want to have an AI look at your translations for you, to make sure that no strings were missed. FWIW, I did an entire six book series, 300,000 words x 28 languages, and only had one sentence that was not translated — why? who knows! — in Chinese. I highly doubt one sentence out of six books in Chinese would’ve thrown a reader off.

(Claude Code, confirming the small fix.)

But there’s no way I can guarantee that it will be perfect.

What I can guarantee though is that, for subscribers (so subscribe now, if you’re on the fence) is that it will be reasonably priced.

By which I mean I will be charging current subscribers nothing for set up or storage —

(unless you upload like 100 books to my system, and then we’ll talk, lol) — I freakin’ love the fact that, on some level, you’ve been paying me to code (and putting up with my brillant but hotheaded nonsense) so this is my way of giving back.

On the far side of this beta with you all (but that subscribers will be grandfathered into for forever!) I’m going to come up with some kind of hassle & hosting fee. I’m working on figuring out what that’s going to look like now, but it’s going to start at at least $50/book.

HOWEVER….

Once that book’s ingested into the system….

You’ll be able to give the system new keys and let it run on any language you choose.

So it won’t be a monthly fee, I don’t think — it’ll just be a ‘one time, we have run your book through all the needed prep’ fee — and after that, you’ll just be able to use your own keys and hit go.

And, because I’m all about the ‘let’s do this shit in bulk’ lifestyle, down the line I’m going to make it work so that you can access it via API itself, and can schedule mass-translations and ingestions of books at once, for authors with large backlist catalogs.

It’s not entirely magic, you will need to approve several files before launching (genre, tone, voice profiles, terms, etc) — so it won’t be an entirely hands off process, but it is possible to get it to something you can hand off to a PA or fan who knows your books well.

It might not be magic — but it will work.

On a more personal note, this past week’s been thrilling.

I’ve been waiting SO LONG to ship stuff.

I’ve been working on Arachne since Nov 2025, and vertical dramas since Jan (but been talking about them for a year now!) and now we’re going to take them live next week.

I’m also going to start using them (bc I localized them!) in all of my FB ads which I’m going to start sending towards these books from everywhere and and and —

I just feel like so much that I’ve been dogpaddling with for SO LONG is finally, finally, coming together.

Plus, it’s really fun to be actually making software?

I’m so glad I’ve been such a fucking nerd here for months (years?) because I know what questions to ask and how to pull things together — honestly, doing front end stuff (or having Codex do it for me, rather) is pretty damn chill by comparison to literally every other stressful thinky-thinking task I’ve recently taken on, lol.

It feels like I’m painting the house instead of building it, heh!

I work tomorrow, and then after that I have seven days off during which I’m gonna:

  1. Perfect Arachne’s beta for Friday’s demo run w/access

  2. Prep all the captions for next week’s vertical drama releases

  3. Use those vertical dramas as FB ads for at least 5 languages, if not more

  4. Release Readerpet widely (!!!!!)

  5. Do a mumble-mumble-super-secret-test-new-project

  6. Work on a Very New Secret Game

  7. …sleep? Some? Eventually? lol

I cannot wait to show you all this on Friday!!!

xoxo!

Cassie