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 ;-)