The Part I Won't Automate
The AI tools for author businesses have gotten genuinely good. That's exactly the problem.
I've been to three or four webinars in the last few months where solo entrepreneurs demonstrate what AI can now do for a small business. This isn’t the 2023 version, where you'd train a bot on your brand voice and get back social posts that sounded like a LinkedIn influencer with a concussion. This is the current version.
One of them promised to show us how to build custom sales pages, upsells, thank-you pages, fulfillment emails, abandoned-cart emails, and launch emails—with original artwork and copy—in under four hours.
Four hours. For a whole launch funnel.
Others demoed six or twelve months of scheduled social content, blurbs and synopses for a backlist, sales data analyzed and turned into ad recommendations, then the ads written and running. Approval queues so you can glance at it all before it goes out, if you want to.
I sat there thinking: why wouldn't I do this?
That's not rhetorical. I'd like an answer.
The appeal is real, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise
This kind of AI-powered business boost is an easy sell to people like me: hand over the parts of your business you don't want to do—for most of us, that's marketing and sales—and you put all your energy into writing more books.
I love the craft. Even on hard days I like opening the manuscript, shaping events, writing dialogue, watching characters come alive over the course of a draft. That part I'd never give away.
The AI tools promise consistency, something I have never once managed on my own. Showing up in the same places, at the same intervals, with the same voice, for months without dropping off.
That's the thing that actually sells books, and I'm bad at it, and I know I'm bad at it.
So it's tempting to run the numbers on what might come back. Maybe I’d reach readers who'd never have found my series otherwise. Or get invited to speak with podcast hosts who need a guest with a hook. Or find other authors to collaborate with, which is the part of this work I like best.
It seemed like it would work. What’s more, it seemed like it would help me achieve more than I’ve dared hope for in my solo indie author business.
What the AI tools are actually removing
Despite all the promises, I still didn’t leap to YES! Sign me up!
Instead, I sat with: What, exactly, was I being offered relief from?
What I was being offered relief from was the discomfort of participating more deeply and seamlessly in systems I don’t trust.
Marketing an author business means being on platforms I've already decided I don't respect. Amazon and Meta have made it clear enough who they're for—not their workers, not their customers, not the environment, not idealistic concepts like democracy or equality, but shareholders, and the returns those shareholders expect. Profit, profit, and profit.
It's just the arrangement.
I've participated anyway. I've been holding my nose and doing it for years, because the alternatives are a lot of local events, a lot of personal networking, or selling only from my own website and hoping people find it.
So the offer to use AI tools isn't really automate your marketing. The offer is: stop having to hold your nose. Hand the flinching to something that doesn't flinch.
And I think the flinch was doing something.
It's the thing that keeps me aware of what I'm participating in every time I participate in it. Automating that wouldn't change my relationship to these platforms. It would just make it comfortable, and I'd stop noticing, which is the same thing as consenting with extra steps.
“The offer isn’t automate your marketing. The offer is about not having to hold your nose. Hand the flinching to something that doesn’t flinch.”
The voice that says do it anyway
I should also be honest about why "why wouldn't I do this?" was so loud in my head.
It came from the part of me that measures my worth in output. If I'm not checking things off, making things happen, producing results toward a profitable outcome, then the day was a waste.
Add up too many wasted days, and you end up with a judgment about yourself: you’re not creating any value.
And the natural extension, of course: you’re not valuable as a worker.
That voice is powerful because she's right about the incentives.
In this system, especially for women in small, creative businesses, produce-produce-produce and sell to the masses through whatever channel everyone else is using can feel like the only safe path to being worthy as a human. (Ouch.)
But that voice doesn't get the only vote.
That's a whole other post, and I'm going to write it.
What I think is going on
The problem isn’t signing up for automation. It’s that convenience can make participation feel morally neutral. Especially when the system rewards us for not looking too closely.
Participating in any of the mass marketing platforms for authors requires not looking at quite a lot: exploitative labor practices, environmental degradation, support of political candidates and platforms I vehemently do not want to support, jobs disappearing thousands at a time at the very companies building these platforms, and a definition of "successful" written mostly by people who profit when we accept it.
Every new convenience within this system is one more reason not to look.
I don't think that's a plan anyone drew up. It's just what happens when the frictionless option is reliably the profitable one, over and over, for years.
“Every new convenience is one more reason not to look.”
I'm not anti-AI. I'm pro-human.
I use AI tools. I've written about using them. I have a genuinely useful working relationship with Claude across a lot of my creative life, and I'm not staging a conversion here.
What I'm against is a storyline that's gotten very loud lately:
You may hate the business models Big Tech run on, but if it helps your work, you have to use it.
Focus on goals and outcomes that create success. Don't think too hard about what it takes to get there.
The further we follow that storyline—technology built for profit, and profit for very few—the further we get from what we actually want as humans, which was supposedly the point of all of it.
Where I've landed, for now
I'm not setting up the AI marketing agents.
I don't have an alternative plan. I'm still on the Big Tech platforms. I'm still selling books through Amazon. I’m still showing up as human me on social media on whatever sites I care to be on, which is increasingly fewer and less often.
I'm still compromised in most of the ways I've just described, and the line I've drawn is narrow enough that I'm not sure it's the right line—only that it's where the ick got loud enough to stop me.
What I keep coming back to is a question I'd like to get better at asking before I automate anything:
For what?
What does all this productivity actually get me?
Does it earn more for the companies my attention is invested in? Does it cover a life I want—satisfying work, housing, healthcare, food, ecological balance, something to pass on?
Or am I just getting very efficient at participating in something that doesn't make anything better?
I don't know yet. For now, I’d rather stay with the question than automate it away. I’m going the slow way while I find out.
I'm Jennifer Lewy, author of the Game of Paradise YA sci-fi series. The books imagine a future where the United States collapses and then rebuilds under a powerful AI called the NEWRRTH. I've been featured in the Detroit Free Press for pioneering AI use in the creative process.
If you want thoughtful, grounded writing about AI, creativity, and the future of storytelling, join my newsletter. You'll get the free prequel, When the Light Came, when you sign up.
Explore the Game of Paradise series: The One Game | The One Exiled | The One Reborn (coming January 2027)
Last updated July 27, 2026