In this solo walkthrough, Nicolas Cole demonstrates how he built an AI‑powered publishing house for sci‑fi/fantasy short stories using the Cowork agent and Notion as a workspace. He created a Notion page called the "77 Project" to serve as a hub for generating 77 stories. He broke the publishing process into discrete steps—ideation, drafting, proofreading, congruency checks, and pre‑publishing tasks such as keyword research, book description, category selection, subtitle, and cover‑art prompts—and built a separate Cowork skill for each. By chaining these skills, he can feed an initial story idea to Cowork, which then runs through the entire pipeline, updates a progress tracker, and produces a complete Amazon‑ready publishing package (including tagline, sales description, competitor titles, keywords, categories, subtitle, and Midjourney cover prompts). The automation reduces the typical 50‑hour manual effort per story to roughly one hour. Cole frames the relationship between Cowork and Notion as giving the agent a "wallet"—a tool it can use to act on his behalf. He also recommends his own book, The Art and Business of Online Writing, for new writers.
Chapters
So here is how I built an entire AI-powered publishing house for fiction using Cowork and Notion together. Honestly, the reason why I built this is because I just wanted to pick something so that I could learn how all these tools worked. And then what I ended up building was pretty cool. So I'm going to walk everyone through. It's just a fun little like weekend project. Again, I preface this works for everything. Okay. The first thing I did is step 1. I created a fresh page inside my Notion workspace. I called it the 77 Project. Why did I call it that? Because I like the number 77 and I thought, hey, Cole, this would be a fun challenge. We're going to write 77 sci-fi fantasy short stories and we're going to use AI to do it. Cool. So I create a new page and I give it a name. and I give it a name so that I can tell Cowork, this is the page that I wanna work in, okay? So here's a screenshot, this is the page. And as you can see, I am 17 stories in so far, which is pretty cool. Second is I built a handful of skills to handle each part of the entire process. So if you were to write a novel or you were to write a novella, What are all the steps in a supply chain? Well, first I gotta come up with the idea, so there's the ideating. Then I gotta draft something, there's the writing. Then I gotta proofread it to make sure there aren't any mistakes. I wanna check for congruency, I wanna make sure that everyone's name is correct, there's no spelling and grammar. And then if I wanna publish it on Amazon, I also need to do a bunch of other things to prep it for publishing. I gotta do some keyword research, I gotta write a book description, Right. So what did I do? I took— and I know these steps because I've written and published 10 books at this point. I took these steps and I went, I'm going to isolate each step of the supply chain. I have the idea, I have the drafting, I have the proofreading, I have the pre-publishing, and I built a skill for each step. Okay. Then I aimed Cowork to work inside of this, this Notion hub. And so I go, okay, Cowork, I want to write the next story. I want to work inside the 77 Project Notion hub. I am going to give you, because it needs this input, I'm going to give you the story idea and then you are going to execute on all the skills. So I come up with the idea, the highest leverage thing I can do. And then I want you to take the idea using my framework, flush it out as needed. I want you to draft the first version so that I can go through and look at what do I like, what don't I like. I want you to proofread the whole thing. I want you to update my progress tracker because I want to do this 77 times. So I want you to update my progress tracker and then I want you to prep me my pre-Amazon publishing document. What are all the things that I need to publish this on Amazon? So notice this is not one prompt for one output. This is a series of skills. This is a series of prompts, and I am chaining them together. And so then Cowork goes, you got it, boss. I know where to work. I have my skills. And I got an open field. All I got to do is run and execute through all the skills. So I spend about 30 minutes coming up with the idea, fleshing out like high level. This is what I want the story to be about. Cowork spends 30 minutes. That's how long it takes executing all my skills. So I give it the idea, I press go, and then I walk away and I go do something else and I come back 30 minutes later or I tab to something different. You know, I work in a different, uh, window or I tab to a different task. And then I come back and look, I— this is a recent, um, output goes, all right, great. I did everything. So story number 17 is fully complete. Here's what I did. It wrote 35,000 words, all organized the way that I trained it to be organized. It also created a pre-publishing, uh, package for that book on Amazon. It has a tagline, a sales description, 5, uh, comp titles so I could run ads against it if I want to. Keywords, long-tail phrases, category recommendations for when I upload it, subtitle. And I even trained it to create Midjourney prompts to generate cover art. Then it updates my project, my progress tracker, and then it says the only thing I need from you is— and then it's done. And I have been successfully doing this on Amazon in case anyone wants to see, but I've been taking these and actually publishing them on Amazon. Start to finish. So what, what would take like literally 50 hours per story, I can do in an hour if I want to. And the only reason I built this was just so I could learn. I just thought it was cool. Like, I still love doing all the writing myself, and you know, I'm still a purist in all those ways, but I did this just to be like, huh, I wonder how this works. Okay, so this is where you ultimately want to get to. You want to get to thinking of Cowork as your little agent best friend and Notion as the workspace that you're giving the agent. Like, yes, it's your workspace, but really what you're doing is you're giving a workspace to the agent. And then skills allow you to chain tasks together And since the agent has a workspace, it can, it can go do those things for you. No different than if anyone here is really into like finance, and I'm super into personal finance, but a new use case that's coming out is platforms, especially crypto platforms, giving agents wallets. Like, why do you give an agent a wallet? Well, you give an agent a crypto wallet so that it can trade on your behalf so that it can do transactions on your behalf. Right. Notion and Cowork is basically you giving Cowork a wallet. That's really what it is. You're giving Cowork a tool that it can use to go execute on all of these things.
By the way, if you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading The Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. and I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of The Art and Business of Online Writing.
