I spent last night actually writing again to try to finish and publish something from my backlog. Discovered some wonderful minor issues in formatting that will be fixed this weekend so you might also see a new addition to WordCrafter.pro's feature set by Monday
And I have a new skill for the pro tier to use directly in Claude, a consistency and continuity checker. This does NOT replace the editorial room's 50 point checklist but was built to test BookWeaver's story threading engine.
Every Tom, Dick and Mary is throwing out a new automation engine every couple of days and most of them are producing really pretty crap. Each one i look at teaches me something new. Mostly what NOT to do, that's why Im taking more time with this. I've written over 20 books in the BookWeaver system testing and reiterating and its about ready to roll
Full books - Word, PDF, Epub
Audio books
Basic Editting
Kindle Metadata
Raw export to take to another tool like WordCrafter.Pro or your other favorite editor My question and what has really held me up is how to charge for this one. Currently there's no config or api keys to setup. You log in, answer a few questions, have the option of editting at each stop or just say go and you can have 100k words in an hour that is pretty good. Still could use polish and editting (because if AI was perfect we'd all be out of work). 50K or less in about a half hour. Pick your title and pen name, get your Kindle Metadata and decide to export or create an audiobook version.
So each AI call costs, I currently have it at 3 levels of quality none of which are bad, just different models. Audiobooks are using 3 engines at different voice levels, elevenlabs is the most expensive. Final edits, rework/regenerate and calls to nanobanana for covers and editting covers.
Leaving audiobooks out the most expensive book Ive created was $20. This was not the longest, this was the one I liked the most and spent more time editting, regenerating and doing backside coding for found errors. The average cost for the infrastructure overhead right now is $200/month, this will scale as more people use it but this figure is good for about 100 users or so. And the average cost per book is under $10. Would you want to pay $20 or so for 100K word publishable book? How many books a week or month would you want to use this for?
Booknova which is so far the best I've tested is a credit per word 50,000 credits a month for a one time fee of $59 and this only gets you limited features, for their full feature set its $179 or more. It gets more expensive for more words. Not sure how this is going to scale for them. They're pulling the usual limited time false expiration advertising. The next best is $97 for your first 100k book $47 for each thereafter.
Monthly subscriptions are great for companies for budgeting purposes that's why so many of them work this way. Per credit systems are generally more lucrative, the more you use the more you pay. Booknova seems to be frontloading the costs. Great for immediate income not so great for scaling unless they can change to cheaper models and lower quality as they get more users. The math just doesn't work with the tech stack back ends as I know them.
I hadnt planned on throwing this out this way but I prefer transparency to the folks here that are the real following and users. My goal here is to help authors be more productive and successful. My secondary goals are to eat and sleep more regularly and replace my day job with something else. I don't have the desire or need to be rich but do have to pay the bills, a house and garden for my lively and wonderful wife would be nice, and an occasional vacation trip for the family.
Parts of BookWeaver will be added to WordCrafter.Pro as soon as more people test it which is why I want to make it available for use. Parts of WCP are in BW. There are no team interactions in BW. It's just the engine. Ive been testing with taking BW output into the Editorial Room for final editting with truly amazing results so together they are a good team. So here's the quandary. Is BW purely a subscription service with a limit of what you can do in a week or a month, per credit based, or would you rather bring your own Api keys like WCP and just pay a base monthly cost that never changes for the backend.
A) limited credits per month, but you can buy more
B) front loaded tiwred higher cost, limiting features per tier
C) base subscription, Bring your own api keys.
D) some other idea you have
And my Steve Jobs moment: And one more thing...their sibling PlotCrafter.pro will also be available soon! This is the plotting, worldbuilding, characters and full storybible and outline creator designed more for traditional writers needing ideas. But! All THREE tools can work together via import/export and will share the same genres created in WCP.