RacketHub Agents Have Arrived

Whether you're a first-time author or an experienced scribe, writing a book can be overwhelming. A little under two years ago, I created RacketHub to help Racket Publishing clients write their books and manage all related subprocesses: research, writing, editing, design, and promotion—you name it. It's all there.

My rationale was simple: putting every manuscript, book cover, galley, research source, PR lead, and the like in a single folder is madness. Relying on email to manage a project is a recipe for disaster. To help organize the project and maintain everyone's sanity, RacketHub relies on dozens of interconnected databases.

Everyone who has used RacketHub has recognized its utility. At the same time, though, they've all told me that it is initially a little overwhelming.

Point taken.

RacketHub Helper

Today, I'm pleased to announce that RacketHub now ships with two AI agents. The first one addresses users' chief gripe. They can now ask RacketHub questions in plain English. The new agent—RacketHub Helper—then points to answers with clickable links to pages and databases.

An Example

If you're considering writing a prescriptive nonfiction book, you need to see what other titles are out there. Failure to do your homework on existing comps is malpractice—and will come back to bite you in the ass.

RacketHub Helper then points to answers with clickable links to pages and databases.

Yes, there's a place in RacketHub to store comparable titles. Users could always search for the correct database—or anything else, for that matter—via Notion's native functionality:

Now, however, they can just ask the RacketHub Helper agent what they want:

Manuscripts

Ditto for other databases, such as the one that stores manuscripts:

These are just simple examples. I've been training RacketHub Helper to make it even smarter. I'll keep at it. As I've learned from using Claude, agents and other AI tools need time to learn the right way to do things.

RacketHub Research Agent

AI providing better contextual assistance is all fine and dandy, but Notion Custom Agents can do so much more. (Going to Make With Notion 2025 blew my mind.)

Doing the requisite research for your book will take a great deal of time. You'll need to process oodles of articles, books, research papers, and more before you begin writing.

Against this backdrop, the RacketHub Research Agent scours the web for sources relevant to your book. It then automatically returns them to the dedicated Research Sources database.

See below. The agent autonomously found relevant articles on the future of work and returned them. As you can see, it's easy to determine which entries RacketHub Research Agent found. Users decide whether to keep them or not.

Even better, you can customize the RacketHub Research Agent in many ways, including:

• The number of research sources you retrieve.
• The source of those research sources. (Pretty meta, right?)
• The agent's frequency. (If you want to run it on-demand, knock yourself out.)
• The topics the agent returns.

The world is really your oyster. Finally, the agent returns citations for endnotes and bibliographies that comply with The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition.

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The Final Verdict

Does the presence of AI agents make writing a timely, important, and well-received nonfiction text easy? Hell, no. It still requires a great deal of work. There's no doubt, however, that powerful AI agents can be insanely useful.

The next Racket client will learn as much first-hand.

More agents are coming.