About Author Automations Social
We give authors their week back — so you can finish the next book.
Author Automations Social is the social media tool from the team behind Indie Author Magazine and Indie Author Training — and the working software side of our Substack Bestselling Newsletter. Plan a month of posts in an afternoon. Spend the rest of the week writing.
Built by people who serve authors every day
Athenia Creative didn't start out making social media software. We started by helping authors actually run an indie publishing business — through Indie Author Magazine, Indie Author Training, and Chelle's office hours.
What we kept hearing was the same three sentences: “I lost a week of writing time to launch promo.” “I'm running three pen names and I can't keep them straight.” “My posts failed and I didn't even know until a reader emailed me.” So we built the tool that fixes those things for the authors we already serve. Then we opened it up so you could use it too.
We're an AI company that came from authors — not the other way around. Every feature here exists because someone we know was bleeding time over it.
This product is an evolution, not an invention. For years we ran our own social media on Make.comscenarios — webhooks, scheduled modules, the whole automation stack. We taught those workflows to thousands of authors for more than two years. Then we built this tool so the automation didn't need to live in a separate app. And now, with the Claude Cowork / Claude Code plugin, social media stops being an automation at all — it becomes a conversation. You talk to Claude about your book; Claude writes the captions, schedules the posts, and shortens the links. No trigger modules to wire up. No scenarios to debug. Automations taught us what worked; conversations are what comes next.
Five ways we work with authors
Author Automations Social is one part of a wider operation that meets you wherever you are in your author business — reading, learning, planning, shipping a launch, or running the whole business end-to-end.
Indie Author Magazine
Read what's actually working this month. Each issue covers craft, business, marketing, and tools — written by working authors who are figuring it out alongside you, not a marketing department.
Indie Author Training
Take the workshop, sit in on office hours, ask the awkward question in the community. The classroom side of what we do — where you learn the moves before you make them.
Author Automations Newsletter
Our Substack Bestselling weekly — the AI prompts and moves working right now. Practical, copy-paste-ready, no hype. Author Automations Social is the working tool that goes with the newsletter: everything you read about has a place to actually run.
StorytellerOS
Author business in a box. Backlists, translations, audiobooks, ads, social, newsletters, websites, and ecommerce — all under one roof for authors who want the whole operation managed, not just one piece. The rest of this list feeds it.
Author Automations Social You are here
Write less marketing, sell more books. Schedule posts across 14 platforms with separate pen names and an email if anything fails. AI is available if you want it — campaigns, captions, images, video — but every single feature works without AI too. Your launch week stops eating your writing week either way.
What you can count on from us
AI is always optional. The scheduler, the calendar, the queue, the pen-name workspaces, the failure alerts, the Links + QR dashboard — all of it works without any AI. Type your own captions, pick your own images, post on your own schedule. If and when you want AI to draft a caption or build a 30-day campaign, flip it on in Settings. If you don't, nothing calls an AI provider, nothing sends your data to a model, and nothing changes about how the tool works. Your business decisions, your privacy, your call.
You stay the author. When you do use AI, it helps you ship the marketing — it doesn't write your voice, your story, or your relationship with readers. You see every caption before it goes out, and you can rewrite anything the AI gave you in two clicks.
You'll know exactly what it costs. $29/month for the tool. You pay AI providers directly — most authors run $5–$15/month. No markups, no surprise overages, no “starter” tier that can't actually run a real launch.
If a post fails, you'll hear about it. Within 15 minutes. By email. With the platform that failed and the exact reason it failed. One-click retry. So a launch never quietly half-ships and you find out from a reader.
Your pen names actually stay separate. Romance fans don't see your thriller posts. Each pen name has its own calendar, queue, books, and brand voice. Two included. Add more for $5/month each — most series authors never need to.
A note from Chelle
Chelle Honiker, founder
I started Athenia Creative because I wanted the authors I serve to have the kinds of tools they actually need — not what some generic SaaS team thought we needed. I started the Author Automations Newsletter because the AI moves I was teaching in office hours kept needing a longer home than a Slack message.
Author Automations Social is what those moves look like when they're wired into a real product — connected to your books, your pen names, your platforms, ready to go out. The newsletter tells you what to do; this tool does it.
If you publish under a pen name, if your backlist deserves a steady drumbeat, if you're tired of social media being a second full-time job — this is for you. And so are we.