I have wanted to write books since I was a kid.

Books always felt different to me. An article can start with an idea on Tuesday and be online by Thursday. A book feels like this enormous thing sitting somewhere in the future waiting for the version of you who somehow has enough time, enough discipline, enough ideas and enough patience to actually write it.

I never really stopped wanting to do it.

What changed recently is that, for the first time, writing one suddenly feels… doable.

I’ve been playing with three AI book writers I bought after finding them on AppSumo, and the interesting part isn’t that AI can generate thousands of words. ChatGPT has been able to generate thousands of words for a while.

It’s the workflow around those words that caught my attention.

AIWriteBook was the one that got me thinking about all of this.

I came across it a while ago and was immediately drawn to the dashboard. I signed up for the free account right away, started exploring, eventually bought Tier 2 on AppSumo and then upgraded to Tier 3 so I could use my own models through BYOK.

There is something about a great UI combined with a well thought-out workflow that makes you do things in the right order without really thinking about it.

That sounds simple. It isn’t.

A blank ChatGPT window gives me enormous capability, but it also expects me to know what to do next. With AIWriteBook, the product keeps moving me through the book. The idea. The outline. Writing style. Chapters. Editing. Re-editing. Cover. Export.

The part I like most isn’t actually generating the first draft.

I wrote this in my AppSumo review: generating a chapter isn’t what I call writing the book.

The writing starts when I read it and think… nope, this section is wrong. This paragraph doesn’t sound like me. I want to take this chapter somewhere else. This idea needs more room. This one needs to disappear.

AIWriteBook lets you keep working at that level instead of treating generation as the finish line. You can go back into the chapter, edit it, regenerate weaker pieces and keep refining without blowing everything up and starting again.

That is much closer to how I think writing should work.

Then there is First Book AI.

I bought this one on AppSumo when there was a $49 lifetime deal, and I still think it is a fantastic alternative, particularly if what you need is someone to get you moving.

Its approach is very guided. It asks about what you know, who you are writing for, your stories and what you want the book to accomplish. Then it creates the outline before taking you through the manuscript chapter by chapter.

Again… workflow.

The third one is Scribeist, which I am still exploring.

Scribeist feels a little different from the other two. It is closer to a complete writing workspace. Your drafts, research, notes, outline and writing style live together, and the AI can work with the context of the project rather than treating every prompt like a completely new conversation.

That approach interests me a lot because books are long. By chapter twelve, I really don’t want to explain chapter two again.

All three products come at the problem differently, but they are doing something I think general-purpose AI still struggles with: turning a very large creative project into a sequence of smaller decisions.

And when you see it broken down that way, the intimidating part starts shrinking.

Idea. Outline. Chapter one. Fix chapter one. Chapter two…

Suddenly I find myself thinking the same thing I wrote in my AIWriteBook review:

Who doesn’t want to write a book?

I’ve seen the other side of this up close.

I followed Noah Kagan’s journey when he was writing and launching Million Dollar Weekend, and Ryan Levesque through Choose and now Return to Real.

But I wasn’t just watching from the outside. I helped review chapters and was part of their book launch insiders lists and Slack communities, so I got to see some of the machinery behind what eventually shows up on Amazon as a finished book.

That changed my perception of what “writing a book” actually means.

Noah has written publicly about starting the marketing for Million Dollar Weekend 18 months before release. There were podcasts, content, launch planning, bulk buys, a launch team and more than a thousand beta readers giving feedback.

Eighteen months.

Before the thing even came out.

And that is where my excitement about AI book writers runs into the bigger question.

What happens after I press Export?

AI is making the writing part dramatically easier. Self-publishing already removed a lot of the old gatekeeping around actually getting a book into the world.

But neither of those things automatically gives you readers.

You still need positioning. An audience. A reason for someone to care. A launch. Reviews. Distribution. Interviews. Partnerships. Content. Emails. Probably a hundred small things I haven’t even thought about yet.

Seeing those launches from the inside made that part very real for me.

Some days it feels like writing the book might be 20% of the journey and everything that happens around it is the other 80%.

Maybe that ratio is wrong.

But I don’t think the gap is the blank page anymore.

This connects to something I keep coming back to in my AI Content Writing Tools guide.

General AI is already very good at producing a first draft.

So if I am going to pay for another AI writing product, it has to earn that place by giving me something beyond another text box connected to a model.

Maybe that is research. Maybe it is voice and brand controls. Maybe it is publishing integration. Maybe it is automation.

Or maybe, as these book writers are showing me, it is simply a better workflow.

The specialized product knows what kind of thing I am trying to create and helps me move through the process in the right order.

That matters a lot more to me than whether its underlying model can generate a slightly prettier paragraph than ChatGPT.

Read the AI Content Writing Tools guide here.

I think this category is going to get much more interesting.

The first wave of AI writing products was mostly about generating words faster.

These book tools are starting to package the process around those words.

And I suspect the next gap is everything that happens after the manuscript exists.

If I were building an AI book writer today, I wouldn’t spend my energy trying to beat Claude at prose. I’d look hard at everything between “I want to write a book” and a finished manuscript, then everything between the finished manuscript and an audience. That’s where the product still has room to be extremely useful and differentiated.

AIWriteBook is already starting to move in that direction with author pages and tools around getting a finished book in front of readers. That caught my attention because it recognizes something important: export isn’t the end of the workflow.

Maybe the really valuable AI book platform eventually helps with the entire journey. Idea to manuscript. Manuscript to finished book. Finished book to an audience.

I’ve wanted to write books for most of my life.

For the first time, I don’t feel particularly worried about whether I can get one written.

Now I’m staring at the next problem…

Who’s going to read it?

More soon,

Abe

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