We built a desktop tool that runs a book through 56 AI-orchestrated production steps and outputs a print-ready PDF. Looking for writers willing to break it.
TL;DR. We built a desktop app at SynaptrixAI that takes a book idea and walks it through ~56 production steps — discovery, drafting, developmental edit, fact-check, continuity, copyedit, supervisor pass, galley proof, citation resolution, typesetting, EPUB. Output: a versioned project folder on your disk + a print-ready PDF. It’s free during beta. It runs on your own Claude Code subscription (or your Anthropic API key if you’d rather pay-as-you-go). We’re looking for ~20 writers willing to install it, run a chapter, and tell us where it breaks.
Why we’re posting here specifically. Most of you already know what / NovelCrafter / Claude / ChatGPT feel like. BookForge is structurally different from any of those, and we want feedback from people who have a baseline to compare against. If you’ve never used an AI writing tool, you’re welcome too, but you’ll have a flatter learning curve.
The structural difference, in one paragraph: chat tools give you a conversation. BookForge gives you a project. Every step writes a versioned file to disk. The fact-checker emits a JSON sidecar that a separate “patcher” skill applies surgically with anchor uniqueness, frozen-prose protection, and a ±20% diff gate. Citations resolve deterministically — [[claim:source-id]] tokens get rewritten to numbered footnotes from a real source library; if a token can’t be resolved, the run fails loudly instead of inventing a footnote. You can wrap any passage in {{frozen}}…{{/frozen}} and no downstream skill will touch it (memoir, dialogue you nailed, quoted material).
What it actually ships, end-to-end:
- Discovery → blueprint, audience, chapter architecture
- A1 drafting with style variants (run multiple in parallel, pick the one that fits)
- Editorial chain (developmental, fact-check, continuity, copyedit, supervisor)
- Galley proof + structured remarks + per-remark accept/reject UI
- C9.7 deterministic citation freeze
- C10 typesetting → print-ready PDF (with metadata, /PageLabels, chapter bookmarks)
- C11 EPUB
- Multi-volume series mode (canonical character bible shared across siblings)
What it costs. Nothing during beta. AI runs use your own Claude account — by default it invokes the Claude Code CLI on your machine and your existing flat-fee subscription covers the runs. If you’d rather pay per token, plug in an Anthropic API key (a typical novel runs roughly $15–$60 across all passes). No card from us. No upsell prompts.
What it isn’t. It’s not bring-your-own-LLM (Claude only today; multi-provider is on the roadmap, not shipped). It’s not a chat sidekick — there’s a per-paragraph annotations editor, but the unit of work is a pipeline step, not a turn. It’s not a short-form tool — if you write blog posts, this is overkill. And it’s not magic — the AI will still hallucinate inside individual prose passes; the audit chain catches a lot but you’re still the editor of last resort.
What we’re asking from this sub. Install it (Windows today; macOS / Linux in active development), run discovery + A1 on one chapter, file a bug or post a screenshot of where the matrix view confused you. The in-app feedback button writes straight to our inbox. We read every entry within 48h.
Disclosure. I’m on the BookForge team at Synaptrix AI — happy to answer any architecture / model / cost / cache question in comments, including which models each step uses, why we chose Electron + better-sqlite3 over a SaaS, and where the prompt-cache actually hits.