Your readers want more than the book.
Give them you.
Author Protégé is the Apex Replicant product line for non-fiction authors, thought leaders, and content creators. The protege is trained on your full body of work (your books, articles, talks, podcasts) and becomes a 24/7 conversational extension of your intellectual brand. Readers don't just buy the book. They talk to you about it.
Why Author Protégé exists.
You wrote the book because you had something to say. Readers finish it with more questions. They want to know what you'd say to them, about their situation, with your methodology.
That conversation never happens at scale. You can't do a 1:1 call with every reader. Speaking engagements scale your time, not your reach. Office hours fill up by 9am.
Author Protégé is the missing surface. Your full body of work, your voice, your methodology: available 24/7 in a live voice conversation.
How Author Protégé is trained.
Full corpus ingestion
Every book, every long-form article, every keynote transcript, every podcast you have published: uploaded once, ingested and indexed by the platform. The protege has read everything you have published. Multi-source ingestion supports PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD, HTML, audio, video, RSS feeds.
Voice training
A guided onboarding voice session captures the way you talk, your pacing, your characteristic rhetorical moves. The protege learns your voice from your actual voice, not a writing-style intake form.
Methodology distillation
AI Upload Insights extracts 5 to 10 key insights from each piece of content before ingestion. You curate which insights become canonical, which are nuance, and which get weighted down. Your signature ideas surface first in every conversation.
Refinement loop
As readers talk to your protege, you can drop in natural-language feedback any time ("be less formal", "always reference the framework from chapter 3", "lean into the autism-advocacy frame when relevant"). Each refinement creates a new immutable version of your protege.
What readers experience.
Live voice, not chat. Readers click a link, hit "Talk to [Author]," and have a real voice conversation: sub-second latency, natural turn-taking, the protege recognizes pauses and follow-ups.
Grounded in your actual work. When the protege references chapter 3, it is because chapter 3 says what the protege says it says. Zero-hallucination architecture: the protege refuses to guess when it does not know.
Personal to the conversation. With the Codex add-on enabled, a reader can drop in their own document (a draft pitch, a 360 review, a contract) and the protege reads it with them, in your voice, applying your methodology to their specific situation.
Who Author Protégé is for.
Non-fiction authors
One or more published books. The protege reads everything you have written and becomes the long tail of your book launch.
Thought leaders with substantial libraries
Podcast or YouTube body of work. Audio plus video ingestion means the protege learns from how you talk, not just how you write.
Course creators and educators
The protege becomes the on-ramp for every reader who wants the framework but is not ready for the course.
Partners.
We partner with Authors Unite (the publishing community founded by Tyler Wagner) to bring Author Protégé to non-fiction authors building their intellectual brand. Authors in the Authors Unite community get a dedicated onboarding track and partnership pricing.
Featured Author Protégé (live): Karen Simmons, globally recognized autism advocate, author, and founder of the Autism Today Foundation. See Karen's case study at /case-studies/karen-simmons.
Apply for a custom proposal.
Author Protégé pricing depends on the depth of your body of work, the cadence of reader engagement you want, and whether the Codex add-on is part of the deployment. We send a custom proposal within one business day of your application.
Apply for Author Protégé: /author-protege/apply
Common questions.
- How long until my Author Protégé is live?
- Corpus ingestion (book + articles + podcasts) takes 24 to 48 hours after upload. Voice training is a 60-minute guided session. First publishable Author Protégé typically lands in 3 to 5 days from kickoff.
- Who owns the protege?
- You do. You can take it with you if the relationship ends. Your knowledge base, your voice profile, your refinements: all yours.
- Can my Author Protégé read my readers' documents during a session?
- Yes, with the Codex add-on enabled ($49/mo or $399/yr). Readers can drop in their own materials (a draft, a contract, a pitch) and your protege reads them on the call in your voice. See /codex.
- What if my protege says something I disagree with?
- You drop in a natural-language refinement: "Don't agree with this, the actual framework from chapter 3 is X." Gemini extracts the instruction, creates a new immutable version of your protege, and the next conversation reflects the change. One request, no engineering.
- Can I run more than one protege?
- Yes. Authors with multiple personas (speaker, author, coach) can run a protege per persona, each with its own KB, voice, and audience.
- Do you support translated editions?
- Yes, via multi-source ingestion. Upload the English-language and translated editions; the protege indexes both. The voice deployment is currently English-only; multilingual voice is on the roadmap.
Apply for
Author Protégé.
Tell us about your body of work. We'll come back with a plan to bring your voice to the readers who want more than the book.