First Book ai Reviews

First Book ai helps you organize your ideas into structured outlines. I have always wanted to publish my thoughts, and now I have a co-pilot to help me through the process. The formatting is gorgeous. I am sold! Check out my first piece below:

Kindle: https://amzn.to/3AB3p3T
Hardcover: https://amzn.to/3Zc1eNB
Paperback: https://amzn.to/40NSUot

I learned about this deal through the First Book ai newsletter and decided to check it out on AppSumo, which I hadn’t used before. I’ve used First Book ai before, and my previous experience was positive, so the discount made it an easy choice to try again.

The book I received was a solid starting point. It wasn’t a finished product, which they made clear, so I had to add my own graphics and adjust some sections to fit my vision. That part took some work, but it gave me a lot of control over the final result. Overall, I think it’s a good deal if you’re prepared to put in a bit of effort to make it your own.

Let me first start with mentioning that I really want this product to succeed. And that I love the "why" and the vision of the founder. I wanted this product to be great. Since I have been thinking and postponing for so long to write my first book. This product did get me started and I am going to continue working on it. However, not with FirstBook.ai though.. So In a way, you have already helped me getting started!

Now let me give some feedback in the hope this product can become better in the future and that we can all benefit from it :) I tested out Tier 2 and the Book Outline option.

I do like the way how it starts with asking questions and that you need to provide an introduction chapter and anecdote. As a ChatGPT user, I understand how this will help to get the right tone of voice and writing style. It can also help the AI to have a better understanding of the context and the topic.

After the outline, I did want to change the title. Which was not possible. So once you have chosen the title in the beginning, there is no way back. This seems like an easy feature to change.. however, I don't know what is behind the scenes.

After generating an outline, I was not really impressed. The app did a good job, but it needed more refinement to be "less AI". So, the app gives a great starting point and it will help to save time, but in the end you still have to rephrase and rewrite the outline. This is what I had expected, since it's also the case with other AI tools. However, it could be great to have a more easy way to generate the outline and give more feedback of what it should consider. Then you still need to modify it, which makes sense: I want to make a book that sounds like *me* and the AI will help to save time and to get you "unstuck".

The instructions are to limit to max. 8 chapters, which is probably based on industry standards for business books. I understand that the limit can help the AI and at the same time helps the author to not overwhelm the audience. So, I like it that the app is weaving in some "best practices" to write better. This is exactly what I was expecting.

After the Book Outline was finished, I expected that I could turn it into a Full Book, which is not the case. That does not feel logical, since after the outline, I want to expand on it, even with doing manual rewriting of parts. I feel that there shouldn't be a distinction between the two and that the outline is just a "phase" of a full book. I understand that the founder has more use-cases than that I can image where you only need an outline and stop there...

I am giving two tacos, since I love the idea of the app, why it is created and it did get me started. However, I was able to do the same thing using a paid version of ChatGPT, without being limited to only have 3 books. And I used ChatGPT to refine the book outline and introduction chapter. Which seems to be the goal of an Book Outline. So, for me the product is a great start, but not yet where it should be.. however I would encourage to keep going and implement the feedback of this campaign.

My ability to review this product can be seen as:
• A superpower, considering I’ve spent a year building a similar product,
• A futile power, as I am undeniably biased.

Nevertheless, I shall give my 2 cents.

A book making app has to overcome a huge challenge to become a real product. To generate a proper book, an app must hundreds if not thousands of steps, and each one is a failure point. You might have heard that AI apps are a pain because they are not deterministic, fail 10% of the time, etc. Well, when you have a pipeline of hundreds of steps where its step can be a mis-step, an AI-based app becomes a nightmare.

And so it happened, a zillion book writing apps sprung up, promising to write you the book you had no time to write. Magic Bookifier was the first one to show up here, in Appsumo. They recently announced support for “long-form” content, that is, 30K words…

Non-fiction books are 100K words and upwards.

Alas, none of the apps that are out there offer any substantial word counts. The problems comes back to the pipeline thing I mentioned above. Magic Bookifier was producing 15K words “books” when it launched here.

In our company, we call them article confetti. Even when one of these apps works to deliver the promised word count, it’s just a series of stitched articles rather than a cohesive book.

I want to make it clear that the pipeline problem does not make a book writing app impossible, it just makes it very, very difficult to implement. To put things in perspective, a typical cloud-based system might have about a dozen SQS queues. An asynchronous book making architecture needs over a hundred queues. The same goes for Microservices and workers. Our system has 169 types of workers. In comparison, Upwork has about 100. I would wage that FirstBook runs no more than ten which is perfectly reasonable at that scale and resources.

Another side of the issue is that, even if you do put up the investment to build such a system, there is nothing for the client to see until they try to make a book. So, a $50K system and a $1M system may have the same front-end. Add the customer confusion and bad experience dealing with “book writing apps”, and it’s over before it started.

Where does that leave us with FirstBook.ai
• It is not a wrapper, even though it might look like one. As I explained above, getting even a basic version of a book writing app to work is not easy.
• It does save time, copy/pasting and tendonitis.
• It produces “books” if 20K words is book to you. It’s not for me, even though I have a few of these on KDP.
• It is more cohesive than other book writing apps which means they do more than stitch the articles one after the other.
• Its price is horrendous. $49 for a 20K word book on “how to launch on PH” does not make sense for most people, including me. I will be refunding this.
• Finally, the text reads like AI-generated text. One low-hanging fruit for the developers here would be to make the paragraph sizes less uniform.

Disclosure: As I said, I have worked on building a similar app although it was unfortunately not accepted by Appsumo for reasons I will never fathom. No hard feelings though, and best of luck to FirstBook. I know your pain ;-)

I'll start this review by saying I really, really, really wanted this product to deliver. I had high expectations and as someone who's written a few books with AI previously, I know some of the nuances and challenges. Unfortunately, this failed to deliver, even in some of the basic areas.

To start, the plans are very off putting an not a true Lifetime Deal but rather a steep discount. Regardless of what their normal pricing is, even at the AppSumo discount price, it's overpriced for a single book or package of books. This is especially true based on the output of the final book...

When starting your book, you're limited to only a few options in terms of the target audience and the style. From there, you provide a brief description of the book along with writing your first introduction chapter in your own voice along with any stories or case studies. It'll provide you with an outline for the book and once you approve the outline, you're pretty limited moving forward. The tool then simply starts and takes about 1 hour before the entire book is completed. Unfortunately, there's no way to review the work as it's going or review chapters to assure it's on the track you one. It's all or nothing.

How are the results? Well, let's just say instantly I could tell it was written by A.I. It appears to have ignored my tone and style in the introduction altogether and defaulted to a lot of overused and very common AI words and phrases throughout. Things like "delve into" ,"unlock" , "explore", etc. There was no way to prompt it to avoid commonly used AI words. To that point, there was also no real area to prompt or provide details on key elements to include aside from the short description of the book you want to write.

Based on the output, I went to Claude and tried to recreate the book and it was significantly more natural and more control over the output. Sure it took a little longer (30-60 minutes), but I had more control and simply reviewed, adjusted, and proceeded chapter by chapter.

Would I recommend this? I don't know, probably not at the current price point. The tool has a lot of potential but the only clear value proposition that I see at the moment is that it writes the entire book in one go. That also is it's weakness in that you don't have the ability to get ultra specific and adjust sections. I'll personally be refunding this but if you just need a quick book and aren't as concerned about specifics and don't want to go chapter by chapter using a LLM like Claude or ChatGPT, it may be worth a look.