YouBooks Review: I Used AI to Write a 200-Page Book

What Is YouBooks and Why Should You Care?

Writing a book is one of those goals that sits permanently on the to-do list for most entrepreneurs and content creators. You have the knowledge, the experience, and probably hundreds of hours of content already published across YouTube, podcasts, or blogs. What you don't have is the time or patience to sit down and turn all of that into a cohesive, 200-page manuscript.

YouBooks is an AI-powered book creation platform available on AppSumo that aims to bridge that gap. Rather than just dumping your prompt into ChatGPT and hoping for the best, YouBooks takes a more structured approach. It lets you feed in your own content as source material, define your writing style, and even model the tone after a specific author. The result is a full-length nonfiction book that draws from your actual expertise rather than generic AI filler.

The platform is available as a lifetime deal starting at $59, which gets you 200,000 credits per month that renew indefinitely. Higher tiers unlock additional features like custom human models and API key discounts. For anyone who's been sitting on years of content and wondering how to turn it into something bigger, YouBooks presents a genuinely interesting proposition.

Pricing Plans and Credit System

YouBooks uses a credit-based system, and how many credits you burn through depends on what you're doing. Uploading content sources, creating human models, and generating the book itself all consume credits. On the base tier at $59, you get 200,000 credits per month that renew automatically since it's a lifetime deal.

The pricing goes up to tier four, which gets you significantly more monthly credits and steeper discounts when using your own API keys. If you connect an API key from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini, YouBooks reduces your credit consumption because you're covering the expensive LLM processing costs yourself. On tier three, that discount is 80% off credit usage. On tier four, it jumps to 90% off.

This is actually a fair compromise compared to many AppSumo tools that either refuse to support API keys or charge full credits regardless. YouBooks acknowledges that they still handle storage, processing, and infrastructure on their end, so they take a small cut even when you bring your own keys. It's transparent and reasonable.

Content Sources: Your Knowledge Base

Before you start generating a book, YouBooks wants you to build a foundation of source material. Content sources act as a knowledge base that the AI pulls facts, insights, and information from during the writing process. This is separate from your writing style — it's purely about what the book knows, not how it reads.

For content creators, this is where things get interesting. If you've got transcripts from YouTube videos, podcast episodes, or blog posts, you can upload them as content sources. The AI will draw on that material to ensure your book contains your actual ideas and expertise rather than recycled internet content. Each file upload costs credits — roughly 2,000 credits per transcript — and files need to be uploaded one at a time, which is a minor annoyance if you have dozens of transcripts to process.

One important distinction: content sources don't influence the writing style of your book. They're strictly a factual reference library. So even though you might upload conversational YouTube transcripts, the AI won't mimic your speaking patterns from those files. That's handled by separate features. For a test run, uploading around 33,000 words of YouTube transcripts cost approximately 30,000 credits, leaving plenty of room on the base tier for the actual book generation.

Style Prompts: Defining Your Voice

Style prompts let you describe how your book should read. Are you going for funny and conversational? Academic and authoritative? Somewhere in between? This is where you tell the AI what kind of writer you want it to be.

YouBooks recommends using ChatGPT or Claude to help craft your style prompt, which is solid advice since writing a prompt that accurately captures a writing voice is harder than it sounds. For this test, the style prompt was inspired by Mark Manson's tone — witty and engaging without being so clever that it confuses the reader. Claude generated a detailed style description that needed to be trimmed down to fit within the roughly 700-character limit.

That character limit is one of the platform's rough edges. There's no visible counter or limit indicator in the browser, so you won't know you've exceeded it until the submission fails. It's a small friction point that could easily be fixed with a character counter. Once you've nailed down a style prompt that fits, you save it as a reusable preset that can be applied to any future book projects.

Human Models: Mimicking Real Writing Styles

Human models are YouBooks' most ambitious feature, and they're only available from tier two and above. While style prompts give the AI a brief description of how to write, human models train it on actual writing samples — ideally around 50,000 words of content from a specific author or style you want to emulate.

For this test, Tim Ferriss served as the human model source. Tim publishes the first few chapters of all his books for free on his website as PDFs, which provided nearly 50,000 words of training material. Before uploading, YouBooks recommends cleaning the text to remove tables of contents, disclaimers, legal notices, and other non-content elements. Running the PDFs through Claude to strip out that clutter took just a few minutes.

Creating the human model cost about 4,800 credits and took over 20 minutes to process — substantially longer than uploading content sources. YouBooks does include several pre-built human models like Benjamin Franklin, Booker T. Washington, and Florence Nightingale, though these aren't listed in the human models section of the dashboard, only appearing when you're configuring a book. Using a human model adds a 20% credit premium to book generation, which makes sense given the additional processing involved.

Creating Your Book: The Prompt and Settings

When it's time to actually generate your book, YouBooks gives you a 6,000-character prompt field to describe your subject matter. This is the core creative brief — what the book is about, who it's for, what topics it should cover, and how it should be structured. For this test, Claude helped generate a detailed prompt outlining a book about choosing and configuring software for small businesses, drawing on years of YouTube reviews and real-world experience.

YouBooks analyzes your prompt and scores it on quality. A well-structured prompt with a specific topic, target audience, and defined scope scored 90 out of 100 — rated as excellent. This quality check is a thoughtful feature that helps users understand whether their prompt gives the AI enough to work with.

Beyond the prompt, you configure several settings. Book structure can lean toward many short chapters or few long chapters, with a balanced option in between. The desired word count defaults to around 70,000 words, which YouBooks notes is the commercial standard for published nonfiction. Try to set it to 350,000 words and the platform will gently nudge you back toward reality. You also choose how heavily your content sources influence the book's structure, whether to enable web search for current facts, and which AI models to use.

AI Models, Costs, and the Outline Review

YouBooks offers a choice between standard and top-tier AI models, and the cost difference is dramatic. A book generation on standard models runs about 72,000 credits, while top-tier models quadruple that to roughly 260,000 credits. The tooltip claims a 10-20% quality improvement with premium models, but the real-world difference between models like GPT-4o Mini and Claude Sonnet is far more significant than that modest estimate suggests.

One of the smartest features is the optional table of contents review, currently in beta. Before YouBooks burns through your credits generating the full book, it pauses to show you the proposed outline. You can drag sections around, rename chapters, delete topics, or add entirely new ones. For this test, the AI generated a comprehensive outline covering software architecture thinking, budgeting strategies, self-hosting with Cloudron, email deliverability, marketing automation, and more — all pulled from the prompt and source materials.

The outline editor is genuinely useful. After reviewing the generated structure, adding a custom conclusion section with four subsections took just a few clicks. Once you approve the outline, the full generation process begins. This approval step could save you thousands of credits if the AI misinterprets your prompt, making it well worth enabling even in its beta state.

The Waiting Game: Book Generation Timeline

Here's where you need to reset your expectations. YouBooks doesn't generate a book in minutes or even hours. The full generation process for a 70,000-word book using top-tier models took approximately three days. The process started on October 19th and completed at 4:41 AM on October 22nd, making it the longest continuous computing task most users will ever experience.

During generation, YouBooks provides real-time progress updates. You can see which section the AI is currently working on, track its position in the production timeline, and watch it move through phases from outline validation to content structuring to actual writing. The page doesn't require refreshing — updates stream in automatically. You also receive an email notification when your book is complete.

This extended timeline is worth keeping in mind when planning your credit usage and expectations. You're not going to sit and watch it work. Start the generation, go about your life, and come back when the email arrives. The platform handles everything autonomously once you approve the outline.

The Finished Product: Quality and Format

The finished book clocked in at roughly 200 pages and was available for download in multiple formats including EPUB. Opening it in Apple Books revealed a well-structured manuscript with chapters, subheadings, and flowing prose that reads naturally rather than like typical AI-generated content.

The writing quality genuinely surprised. The opening passage — comparing a small business to a sturdy ship anchored in a busy harbor — is the kind of metaphor that draws readers in and sets up the practical framework that follows. The Mark Manson-inspired style prompt delivered on its promise, producing content that's engaging and accessible without being gimmicky.

There are rough edges in the formatting. The table of contents had some labeling issues, with chapters appearing out of order in places. These are the kinds of problems you'd catch in a standard editing pass, and they don't reflect the content quality itself. The book would absolutely benefit from human editing before publication — tightening language, verifying facts, and fixing structural quirks — but as a first draft, it's dramatically better than starting from a blank page.

Translation, Publishing, and Getting Credits Back

YouBooks includes a translation feature powered by Google's NMT model that lets you convert your finished book into other languages. The main caveat is that your book needs to be written in English first before translating — starting in another language and translating to English doesn't work as well yet.

There's also a credit recovery program worth knowing about. If you publish your book and share it on social media mentioning YouBooks, they'll refund your credits. You don't necessarily need a traditional publishing deal — posting about your AI-generated book on social platforms qualifies. It's a clever marketing move on their part and a genuine benefit for users who want to write multiple books without burning through their monthly credit allocation.

The platform earned an 8.3 out of 10 rating. The extended generation time and minor formatting issues keep it from a perfect score, but the fact that it produced a coherent, well-structured, 200-page nonfiction book from a collection of YouTube transcripts and a detailed prompt is genuinely impressive. For content creators sitting on years of material who've always wanted to write a book, YouBooks removes the biggest barrier: actually sitting down and writing the thing.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.