Agents All The Way Down

Soon, every author will have an agent. But not the kind you think.

Note: this article may seem futuristic (and it is), but in the end, I give you very tangible steps to building systems and processes that will benefit your author career today 👇

Agents will change publishing more than anything else in the next 3 to 5 years. But… not human agents. Instead, AI Agents. I’m here to explain why.

I want to show you why and how you can get your own “agent” today to help you with marketing, book formatting, and even creating new products based on your books.

What you’ll learn is that, fundamentally, working with an AI agent and/or human virtual assistant is all about what systems you choose to build for your publishing business and the processes you create to operate it.

As many of you know, I’m a futurist. Despite this, I usually focus on how you can better market your books today.

Lately, I’ve been working on AuthorHub, an all-in-one tool to help authors track and optimize their book marketing. It originally started as a fun stretch goal for the Author Marketing Superpowers Kickstarter Campaign (this closed on April 1st).

But you all know I don’t do anything halfway 😂. I’m on a mission to bring Power to Storytellers and help you put your Readers First.

I’ve been having to reflect a lot on this question lately: what does it look like to track and optimize our book marketing in the age of AI? And how will that change over the next few years?

Disclaimer: there will ALWAYS be a place for human assistance in the place of AI. In fact, I believe human assistants are only getting more important. Likewise, it’s essential to have a human reviewing and providing feedback on anything an AI does/creates.

The Rise of Agents (AI ones)

TLDR: AI Agents will allow every author to have multiple AI assistants customized for specific tasks that will do everything from design and send email campaigns on your behalf to formatting your book for you.

AI Agents are any system that acts autonomously to complete actions on the internet with limited to no human involvement (think booking travel or ordering flowers).

This isn’t science fiction. This is already happening. And as the applications that make these interactions possible continue to be built (Claude’s Model Context Protocol, Zapier, and Active Pieces chief among them), these powerful capabilities will only be more widespread.

The onslaught of AI agents in publishing has changed the very nature of AuthorHub. It has shifted to be both more powerful, simpler, and based on a fundamentally radical premise: every author in the future will have an army of AI agents to help you do your marketing.

AI Agents are extensions of the current artificial intelligence applications that many of us are familiar with, such as ChatGPT. The crucial difference is that instead of simply asking the AI a question and giving you an answer, it will actually be able to take action on your behalf inside other applications.

We are already seeing this now with Zapier working with ChatGPT to automate different processes and tasks. For instance, you can design a system that when a reader sends you an email, alerts Zapier to promote ChatGPT to draft a response, and then Zapier can put that draft in your email.

Imagine this, but even simpler and 10x more powerful.

That’s where we are headed.

I’m designing AuthorHub to be a future-proof tool that helps you work with these systems better today and as they radically evolve in the near future so that you can better market your books (seriously, thank you to all my Kickstarter backers for giving me the opportunity to do this… if there’s demand, I can make it available to people outside of the Kickstarter too, let me know!).

In short, track your marketing and optimize it. But instead of you being left to do so on your own, it will give you the prompts, frameworks, and tools to be able to work with AI now and in the future as it evolves into an army of agents that complete tasks on the internet autonomously.

3 Ways AI Agents Will Radically Improve Your Author Business

#1: Strategy and Decision Making

Armed with the right questions, you can utilize AI agents as a strategic partner. Frankly, using ChatGPT, you can already have a marketing strategist in your pocket. But what if it could then execute on those decisions for you?

Imagine a PR Agent that strategizes messaging around your latest book launch and then researches and contacts book influencers on your behalf.

Or a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Agent that automatically makes your Shopify book details page optimized to convert more readers and shifts your page with trends and market movements without any input from you.

#2: Doing the Things a Literary and Film Agent Would Do (Even if You Don’t Have A Human Agent)

Human agents thrive on deal-making and relationships.

What happens when those relationships take place between AI agents talking to each other rather than humans?

The value of an incredible human agent who is tapped into various industries and has awesome relationships will be hard, if not impossible, to replace.

But what about the 99% of authors who don’t have access to the world’s top human agents at the ring of a phone?

A new class of AI IP Licensing Agents specializing in everything from film, to games, to foreign rights and even brand collaborations (think clothing, beauty, and food brands) will be able to proactively reach out to potential partners and help you get your foot in the door.

This is also true for AI Retail Agents, who can email potential retailers (such as indie bookstores) on your behalf and begin building relationships with book buyers (who they themselves may be augmented by agentic abilities to help them manage the inflow of new potential suppliers).

#3: Getting Your Admin Work Done

First, I don’t see a future where the thousands of amazing human assistants that help authors every day are put out of work by AI agents.

In fact, great human assistants will become even more valuable. Folks who are able to manage agentic systems, understand workflows, and ensure the ship is running properly will be invaluable to authors. Let’s face it— not all of us are even going to want to work with AI agents, having people do that effectively on our behalf is amazing.

We all know there is so much to do in a publishing business that regardless of our time and resources, it’s extremely hard just to keep up, nevermind get ahead.

In the near future, AI agents will be able to help us by posting content on our behalf, interacting with the author tools we know and love like Atticus and Vellum to format our books, and even working inside Canva to change up our latest social media graphic in time for our new release.

Instead of running and manning every part of the ship, you will be able to step into the captain’s seat and steer toward your storytelling dreams.

Of course, it won’t come without challenges, but it’s already possible to use these tools to get more done and at a higher level. You can already use Zapier + ChatGPT or Claude + [insert other tool] to automate an absurd amount of workflows from posting on your blog to more.

Chelle over at

Author Automations

is the expert on all things automation. I won’t pretend to even know half of what she does, but I see what future is coming for authors.

And I want to not only help you prepare for it, but also take one step closer to making your book marketing and publishing business run better today.

Here’s how 👇

How to Win in An Agentic Future

There are 3 simple rules to selling more books and achieving a boundless life as an author in a future where AI is an incredible collaborator for your marketing.

And the best part?

You can follow these rules TODAY to help you grow your book sales (with or without the help of AI, I’m supportive whichever you choose!).

Rule #1: Understanding the foundations of great marketing is much more valuable.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

It’s one of the fundamental rules of programming and, candidly, this rings pretty true for one’s nutrition and fitness as well.

You having a taste for what great marketing looks like for YOUR readers and what is best for you to focus on will be paramount.

This also extends (even more importantly) to your craft and storytelling ability.

Essentially, the skills needed to be great at authorship are just as valuable, if not more valuable. For the most part, I view these tools as amplifiers. If you give it great context and directions, you will likely get something amazing back.

If you give it poor context and direction, you might not get something very useful back.

Thus, the same knowledge and experience you have about your readers, their preferences, and the market will remain extremely valuable.

Rule #2: Create your system and playbooks… now.

In my recent article (Day 4 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp), I talked all about the Reader Growth Engines. The fundamental premise is that instead of marketing your books, you should build a system that markets your books for you and scales with time.

You can read that here 👇

Stop marketing your books. Do THIS instead...

But how do you know specifically what to build a system around and how can you collaborate with anyone on getting it done (human or AI)?

The answer is to take a page out of Dan Martell’s book Buy Back Your Time, where he categorizes all work we do into four quadrants:

1. Makes you money directly and you love it (i.e., writing your next book).

2. Makes you money but you dislike it (i.e., reviewing your Ads dashboard and deciding which ads to optimize or publishing content to social media)

3. Doesn’t make you money but you love it (i.e., reading books written by author friends)

4. Doesn’t make you money and you dislike it (i.e., organizing your files, story bibles, answering emails, etc.)

For every person, we will have different tasks fall into different categories. I recommend reflecting on everything you do related to your publishing business and seeing what quadrant each task falls into for you.

Generally, if you love doing it, you should keep doing it. It’s smart to build systems and processes around these tasks so that if your plate becomes full, you can begin to offload those, but not essential.

If it doesn’t make you money and you dislike it, you should consider not doing that activity at all.

Some of these activities we have to do to keep our business operating smoothly. That’s important! But if you hate posting on TikTok and TikTok is also making you no money, getting an AI to help you do that will not make you more money.

Instead, we need to experiment, ideate, and get you to the point where you are seeing results AND THEN build a system and process around it that you can begin to outsource.

In short, don’t try automating things that are non-essential and that aren’t making you money. It will just add more time and stress to your plate, and it’s a bad idea.

At this stage, you are better off remaining in the ideation stage, using any tools to help you brainstorm and strategize.

Now, if you are making money from something but you dislike it… this is the perfect activity to build a system and process around. This system and process can then be executed by an AI or a human.

How to build a process around a task:

• First, define the goal of the process. Is it to post social content? Adapt a newsletter into a TikTok? Draft copy for your next Facebook Ad?

• Then, outline what inputs are needed. If you were handing this task to an intern who knew only rudimentary things about publishing and nothing about your business, what would you have to give them? Any information about your stories? About your past marketing and what has and hasn’t worked?

• Lastly, what does “done” look like? Give examples of great ads, social media posts, or anything related to the output you desire. It should be abundantly clear what success looks like.

At this stage, you can enter all of this into a brief you give to an assistant for their next task, or enter it into your AI of choice and see what it outputs (different AI may be better tuned for specific tasks). Then, you will need to give feedback based on the output about what could be improved and why (this is why fundamental marketing knowledge is so important!).

As you will see, it doesn’t just take the snap of a finger to get anything done on your behalf (AI or not). That’s why you should really be intentional, first, about what needs to get done and what doesn’t.

You can, of course, have multiple steps in these processes where you have multi-stage prompts you enter into an AI system, multiple steps you give to an intern, and communication between systems (such as WordPress and ChatGPT) that you can make happen with Zapier.

All of that is a bit more advanced. For those of you ready to go and explore it, it’s actually super simple to start getting these systems talking, and more tools are coming online to make it even easier.

But before you hook up a bunch of random connections and automation, you first have to answer why it matters, what’s getting done, and give the systems the resources to complete it well. The above steps do just that 😊.

Rule #3: Less is more.

As a final note, going back to the above point, the goal of automation is not to try and tackle 10 more things at once.

Publishing thrives off an extreme Power Law. One or a few books, winning ads, or social media posts are likely to make the lion’s share of your revenue.

More isn’t better. It’s more stressful, and if not focused on areas that are making you profit, it actively takes away from other areas that you could be investing in marketing or creating.

This isn’t an arms race.

You don’t have to rush to make the most of AI or to make the most of anything.

Readers will continue reading books for generations (likely for as long as humanity exists).

There will always be demand for stories.

The question is: what stories will you tell and how will you share them with the world?

I’m excited to share a new article next week all about helping you market your books and put your Readers First. I promise this one won’t be about AI 😆, but an article here and there about AI, I think, will be useful.

In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless,

Michael Evans

The Author Sidekick

P.S. Would you be interested in getting access to AuthorHub, a tool to help you ideate, track, and optimize your book marketing using AI? It will include custom prompts, workflows, and templates based on your current book marketing progress to help you work with the latest and greatest AI systems to sell more books and create incredible experiences for your readers.

The suggested prompts and templates will change based on the data that you feed into AuthorHub about your book sales so that you can take the right action at the right time (the prompts for if you are just getting started with book marketing versus if you have a book that’s made $1,000+ will likely be quite different).

And as a bonus, these “prompts” can be executed by you rather than an AI. It’s up to you! However, I see a lot of power in working with AI for your marketing, and want to help you do that if that’s ever something you are interested in exploring.

Let me know in a reply to this email (you can reply privately so no one sees it), if that would interest you.

P.P.S. Are you a software engineer or fellow nerd about the future of publishing? I’d love to chat. Just email me at hello@authorsidekick.com. In the next couple years our industry is radically changing, and I want to work with the best people in the world to help give authors more power and opportunities to put their Readers First.