Brave New Bookshelf Episode 68 – Iterative AI Writing Workflows and the Inevitability of AI in Publishing with Cassie Alexander

PLEASE NOTE: this episode includes profanity that has not been edited out.

Hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite explore the creative side of AI with artist, illustrator, author, and community leader Tanya Hales, in this episode of Brave New Bookshelf.

Tanya is the founder of the AI Art for Authors Facebook group and the creator behind Animal Magica, a growing fantasy world that blends illustration, coloring books, fiction, world-building, and interactive reader experiences. In this episode, she shares how AI has become part of her creative process, not as a replacement for human artistry, but as a practical assistant that helps her move ideas from imagination to execution.

The conversation covers visual storytelling, book covers, Kickstarter planning, fantasy world-building, neurodivergent creativity, and why today’s debates around AI art are not as new as they may seem.

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Meet Cassie Alexander

Cassie Alexander has been writing since 1998. Her career has taken her through traditional publishing, indie publishing, paranormal romance, monster romance, and now AI-assisted workflows.

After publishing with St. Martin’s Press for more than a decade, Cassie moved into indie publishing and built a career around reader-focused genre fiction. She has also become one of the more visible voices in the AI writing conversation, partly because she is willing to speak openly about the tools she uses, the criticism she receives, and the business results behind her decisions.

Her background in nursing gives her a practical, sometimes blunt view of change. She compares the resistance to AI in publishing with the resistance she saw in healthcare during the pandemic. For Cassie, the lesson is not that everyone must love every new technology. The lesson is that major shifts still happen, whether people feel ready or not.

Why Cassie Believes AI Is Inevitable

A major theme of the conversation is inevitability.

Danica opens the episode by talking about robot caregivers and the role technology may play in supporting aging populations. Cassie connects that to her experience in healthcare, where practical needs often force industries to adopt tools that once seemed uncomfortable or controversial.

She sees a similar pattern in publishing. Authors may object to AI. Communities may debate it intensely. Some groups may create purity pledges or exclusionary rules. But the tools are still developing, readers are still making buying decisions, and the wider market is still moving.

Cassie’s view is that authors should be part of the conversation. Instead of rejecting AI completely, she believes writers can offer feedback, test use cases, identify ethical concerns, and push tools toward workflows that actually help creative professionals.

Facing Backlash as an AI-Forward Author

Cassie also talks openly about the personal cost of being public about AI.

She has been disinvited from events, excluded from certain publishing circles, criticized online, and targeted by people who believe AI has no place in creative work. She describes being treated as a “black sheep” in parts of the author community.

But she also noticed something unexpected. The louder the backlash became, the more attention her books received.

Cassie compares this to the “Streisand Effect,” where attempts to suppress or shame something end up drawing more attention to it. In her case, online criticism, review bombing attempts, and social media outrage sometimes introduced her work to readers who otherwise might never have discovered it.

One of her biggest takeaways is that the loudest criticism often comes from other authors, not readers. Her readers care about the story, the characters, the experience, and whether the book delivers on its promise. That distinction has helped her stay focused on her actual audience instead of getting trapped in what she calls the author echo chamber.

Reader Experience Comes First

Cassie’s approach to AI is not about replacing the human author. It is about improving the reader experience and supporting the business side of authorship.

She talks about using AI-generated visuals for marketing, character art, and world-building. For genres like fantasy, paranormal romance, and monster romance, the right image can help readers instantly understand the tone, atmosphere, and emotional promise of a book.

This is especially useful when stock imagery fails to represent the characters or worlds an author is creating. Cassie mentions examples like plus-size heroines, diverse fantasy characters, or highly specific visual concepts that would be difficult or expensive to find through traditional stock photo sources.

For her, AI allows authors to create “beauty on tap.” It gives them more control over how their stories are presented and helps them communicate the emotional appeal of their books more clearly.

Writing the “Id”

The episode also explores the idea of “writing the Id,” a concept associated with Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes.

The basic idea is that readers are often drawn to deep emotional and psychological hooks: beauty, danger, wealth, power, competition, desire, and transformation. Cassie uses AI as a tool to surface and amplify those elements in her creative and marketing work.

That might mean generating character art that captures a reader’s fantasy more precisely. It might mean brainstorming scenes that heighten emotional stakes. It might mean identifying the visual or narrative elements that make a book feel irresistible to its target audience.

Cassie’s point is not that AI creates the desire on its own. The author still needs taste, judgment, genre knowledge, and creative direction. AI simply gives her more ways to explore and express the core appeal of a story.

Behind Guarded by the AI

One of the most detailed parts of the conversation focuses on Cassie’s book Guarded by the AI.

Cassie created the project partly as a response to critics who claimed AI-assisted writing was lazy or “push-button publishing.” She wanted to document what the process actually looked like.

Her workflow was highly iterative. She worked with a GPT she nicknamed “Jack,” producing more than a million words of back-and-forth discussion, drafting, refining, and revision. The final book was not a simple AI output. It was the result of direction, editing, rewriting, and constant human decision-making.

Cassie estimates that AI-generated text made up around 29.4% of the final manuscript, but every part of the book still passed through her judgment. She shaped the voice, adjusted the prose, made creative decisions, and refined the result.

The launch performed strongly, reaching the top 1,000 in the Amazon store despite attempts to harm the book’s ratings. For Cassie, that success reinforced a key point: AI can be part of a serious writing process, but it does not remove the need for craft, persistence, or authorial control.

AI as an Iterative Partner

Cassie describes AI as a collaborator, not a replacement.

She uses it to brainstorm, test ideas, analyze her own writing, and work through scenes. The process is not clean or automatic. It requires a lot of back-and-forth, and much of the value comes from knowing what to ask, how to evaluate the answer, and when to reject what the tool suggests.

That iterative process is central to her workflow. AI helps her move faster, but it also gives her more material to respond to. It becomes a creative partner that can generate options, reflect patterns, and help her examine her own style.

She also sees potential in using AI conversations as “correction pairs,” where the interaction between author and tool can help train future outputs closer to the author’s voice. This raises bigger questions about voice, ownership, and long-term creative workflows, all of which are likely to become more important as tools evolve.

Tools Mentioned in the Episode

Cassie and the hosts mention several tools and platforms during the conversation:

Midjourney
Cassie uses Midjourney for marketing art, character images, and visual world-building.

ChatGPT
She uses ChatGPT for brainstorming, drafting support, scene development, and creative collaboration.

Claude through Cowork
Cassie uses Claude for larger-scale analysis, especially when working with long conversations and writing data.

Shopify
Cassie uses Shopify to sell directly to readers through her own website.

PublishDrive
Danica mentions PublishDrive as a useful platform for distribution, metadata, and market insights.

Key Takeaways for Authors

The biggest lesson from this episode is that authors need to understand the difference between noise and audience behavior.

Online debates can feel overwhelming, but they do not always reflect what readers care about. Cassie’s experience suggests that readers are often more focused on story quality, emotional satisfaction, and whether a book delivers what they came for.

The episode also makes clear that AI-assisted writing is not easy when done well. It requires strong creative judgment, heavy iteration, editing skills, and a clear sense of audience. The tool can speed up parts of the process, but it does not remove the author from the work.

Cassie’s message is not that every author must use AI in the same way. It is that AI is becoming part of the publishing landscape, and authors should make informed decisions instead of reacting from fear.