First Book ai Reviews

Let me begin by stating my expectations: As a creative fiction writer, I was experimenting with First Book AI simply to get my "creative juices flowing," so to speak, in preparation for a non-fiction project. I had no expectation whatsoever of producing a fully functional book with First Book, nor was that even my goal—all I wanted was an idea of how to outline and structure my general topic. I don't believe my expectations could have been meaningfully lower.

And yet.

Unfortunately, despite having you provide:

1. A rough outline (it generates a rough skeleton, albeit not a good one, for you to edit)
2. Instructions for the tone.
3. Clarity on the audience.
4. A title.
5. A goal.
6. An introductory chapter to help it "write like you" (that it doesn't actually use in the finished project).
7. A series of real-life anecdotes to incorporate (that it ALSO doesn't use; yes, I checked).

… It appears to take nothing, whatsoever, into account, at least in any way I could identify. The writing style bore no resemblance to anything more than generic ChatGPT dross, recognizable from a mile away, spewing out a deluge of lengthy, rambling paragraphs that somehow remain devoid of all substance. Even though I *provided* relevant anecdotes from my own life, as requested, every third or fourth paragraph begins with "I recall…" (almost always with that exact phrase), followed by a bizarre hallucination that has happened to precisely nobody. More insultingly, at least with a combination of Ctrl+F and skimming, not one of the myriad "memories" it output were mine.

There was never any conclusion or point raised; no real attempt to follow the outline; no research (just the rare unsourced statistic that I *highly* doubt is more than a hallucination) or actionable advice. Attempting to read even a chapter was an exhausting feat that more closely resembled a mental hamster wheel than anything substantive.

I cannot recommend First Book for any purpose. Again: rock-bottom expectations that the product fell short of even still, and by no small distance. Alas, I took too long to attempt a generation to qualify for a refund, which is a shame, as there was zero value gained from literally any aspect of it.

Edit to reply to the team: I would recommend reading my first paragraph more carefully. I WAS using it for non-fiction.

First Book ai is, first and foremost, a solid product. It does exactly what it promises: it generates either blueprints or complete books based on a handful of questions, an outline of 8 chapters (each with 3 subheadings), your own introduction, and a set title. One mandatory step is adding anecdotes—something I personally don’t find appealing.

The system is quite strict during the outline review. For example, if you use bullet points within subchapters, it flags this as an error.

Why only 4 tacos?

To be honest, I talked myself into liking the system. The claim is: “First Book ai is an AI ghostwriter that can convert your ideas into a business book ready to share in less than 24 hours.” But this raises the question: what exactly is a “business book”? In my opinion, this is more about self-help or guide literature, not a true specialist book.

Let’s talk facts. What’s the difference between a blueprint and a complete book?

Blueprint: A document of about 24 pages. Each chapter includes a blueprint section and guidelines, plus a section with phrasing suggestions to help you write your own content.

Complete Book: A document of about 160 pages. Creating such a lengthy, logically consistent document is impressive.

However, for my needs, the system still falls short. If you want to write a book with more substance than the interchangeable self-help guides on Amazon Kindle, you’ll need more.

A truly robust book requires reliable sources, citations, illustrations, footnotes, an index, a table of contents, etc. That’s much more work than what’s promised in 24 hours.

Ultimately, this LTD is on AppSumo to mature and improve, so constructive criticism is important.

My suggestions for improvement:

There should be an optimization loop in the process, allowing feedback for each of the 24 subchapters and—crucially—the ability to add sources and references.

Instead of anecdotes (sorry, but in Germany we tend to laugh at this very American style of padding everything with more or less invented “experiences”), I’d prefer a section that asks for thesis, background, and conclusion.

The entire generation process should be more parameterized and customizable.

I’m now trying to turn the draft into a real book. I exported the draft as a Word file and imported it into Scrivener, using Zotero as my reference manager. Scrivener’s advantage is that it can split the Word document into chapters and subchapters, making it easy to work through the manuscript step by step.

I’m still unsure if I’ll keep First Book ai (I bought Tier 4). If I were a regular customer at full price, I’d probably be disappointed—especially if you’re already familiar with AI tools. Comparable results can be achieved with OpenAI, Perplexity, or Claude—not in one step, but through your own iterative process.

Finally, I ran the generated text through several AI detectors; as expected, all of them clearly identified it as AI-generated.

Conclusion:

First Book ai is a promising tool for quickly creating business book drafts or blueprints, but it’s not yet suitable for producing truly in-depth, reference-quality books. I hope the team continues to develop the platform and addresses these points in future updates.

I purchased First Book on April 18 and submitted the information on my first book that same day. The draft that was returned about two hours later was brilliant. I was amazed at the crispness of the writing and how on-point the content was. It took me three days to proof, make edits, and format the document. Today, April 21, the book was submitted to Amazon to publish in both paperback and Kindle formats. Talk about speed to market!

UPDATE: On April 24, my book became available in Amazon as a Kindle book and in paperback. And in case you are wondering, the book had a very specific niche aimed at a subset of physician practices and focus on how to grow practice volume. First Book was a perfect solution for this type of book.

This tool is very nice. Clear instructions to follow while entering the content of the book to be authored.

Positives:

1. Ease of promoting
2. Faster generation of outline
3. Faster generation of book.

Requires improvement:

1. Grammar requires improvement
2. Repetitive sentences seen (with similar meaning) in the total content generated. However this can be overcome after we download the book in word format etc.
3. Only 8 chapters and 3 sub chapters allowed. They can be increased as per requirement. I don't mean to say that they can be 20 or 100 chapters, which may become too much for AI model to generate quality content; but ability to increase the chapters to attend least 20 must be given. I know the creator of this tool has his own technical reasons to limit the numbers to 8, but I felt that as a consumer, it must not limit to just 8.

I have written this review after generating 2 books in just a fantastic span of just 2 hours. That's why star ✨ rating as 4, else it would have been 3, given the good possibility of improvements that can be made for the betterment of the tool and it's users.

Good luck and best wishes to the founding team!

Pros:
--The top tier deal is a no-brainer if you plan to start a publishing empire or provide ghost-writing for clients as a service or a foot-in-the-door value add.
--For my first book, the AI produced over 140 pages of content which is a feat in itself if you've ever tried to get the major LLMs to do the same. All the more impressive when you copy and paste that content into a 6"x9" book template for publication (my preferred format) it comes out to almost 350 pages.

Cons:
--While the generated text is quite well-written, its rhythm is monotone and has little cadence. All paragraphs tend to be about the same length; all sentences have little variety, so it may not be as engaging as it could be. The ample generated text ends up being too much, so a good deal of editing is required. If you're using one or more pen names, then it might not be so concerning. However, if you're using the book as a business card, you'll definitely want to spend enough time in editing mode to make sure it gives the best impression of you and the material. At this point it's debatable whether writing from scratch would be more expedient.
--Providing anecdotes in the template is a great feature, but you should be able to input them into each chapter, so that the same anecdotes don't get sprinkled throughout the entire book. In a book about seniors (60+) starting new businesses, I provided anecdotes of two of my clients (Rob and Jim). As first, I was very impressed the way the AI added them to the manuscript, providing all the pertinent information in a proper context. However, I began to notice how often the same two anecdotes appeared. A search showed that Rob was mentioned 29 times and Jim clocked-in at 23 mentions. Some of the instances are written as though it's for the first time, not acknowledging that this person was mentioned multiple times already. You quickly realize that you're going to have to spend ample time going through the manuscript with a fine tooth comb to pull out repetitive phrases or points that have been mentioned before.

While I think this is a great first release of such a powerful tool, I think there really needs to be more customization functionality to be a true book-writing powerhouse. I've considered keeping this deal to see where the developers go with it, but their tentative responses to roadmap issues doesn't give me a lot of confidence that any major changes are in the works for the near future. I would love to come back to this deal seeing that some implementation of the major points reviewers have left here. I would even pay more for the top tier deal as the value would be there--but not in its current state (IMO). I hope you polish this gem of a project very soon...!