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 Protégé is trained on your full body of work (your books, articles, talks, podcasts). Readers can talk to it any hour and hear your answer, in your voice. 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 reach a room. They still cost you a day.
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 Protégé 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 Protégé learns your voice from your actual voice, not a writing-style intake form.
Methodology distillation
The platform pulls 5 to 10 key ideas out of each piece you upload. 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 Protégé, you can drop in natural-language feedback any time ("be less formal", "always reference the framework from chapter 3", "always use the plain-language version of the framework"). Each refinement creates a new immutable version of your Protégé.
What readers experience.
Live voice, not chat. Readers click a link, press the talk button, and have a real voice conversation. It answers right away, hears your pauses, and handles follow-ups.
Grounded in your actual work. When the Protégé references chapter 3, it is because chapter 3 says what the Protégé says it says. It only knows what you have taught it. When it does not know, it says so instead of guessing.
Personal to the conversation. With the Briefcase add-on enabled, a reader can drop in their own document (a draft pitch, a 360 review, a contract) and the Protégé reads it with them, in your voice, applying your methodology to their specific situation.
Who it fits.
Non-fiction authors
One or more published books. The Protégé 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 Protégé learns from how you talk, not just how you write.
Course creators and educators
The Protégé 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.
Featured Author Protégé: Karen Simmons, autism advocate, author, and founder of the Autism Today Foundation. Karen's case study is linked at the foot of this page.
Author Protégé is $197 a month.
No setup fee, no contract, and you keep 70% of every reader session, for as long as you are on the platform. Briefcase is an add-on, $49 a month or $399 a year, and it is never required.
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 Protégé?
- 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 Briefcase add-on enabled ($49/mo or $399/yr). Readers can drop in their own materials (a draft, a contract, a pitch) and your Protégé reads them on the call in your voice. See the Briefcase page.
- What if my Protégé says something I would not say?
- 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 Protégé, and the next conversation reflects the change. One request, no engineering.
- Can I run more than one Protégé?
- Yes. Authors with multiple personas (speaker, author, coach) can run a Protégé 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 Protégé indexes both. The voice deployment is English only today.
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.