BookForge orchestrates a full publishing pipeline — discovery, outlining, drafting, editing, review, typesetting, and distribution metadata — on your desktop, powered by your own Claude subscription.
Live agent monitor: per-step transcript, token velocity, and cumulative cost as the pipeline runs.
BookForge replaces a tangle of scripts, prompts, and manual hand-offs with a single dashboard that tracks every chapter through every step. Editorial oversight at every gate.
Discovery → blueprint → outlining → drafting → review → patches → print PDF → EPUB → distribution metadata. One app, one consistent workflow across every book you produce.
AI proposes, you dispose. Every significant step routes through a review gate so you can approve, request revisions, or rewrite before it advances. No runaway generation.
Generate multiple takes on a chapter, compare them side-by-side, promote the winner. Every artifact is versioned — revert any chapter to any previous step, any time.
Built for small publishing houses: editorial directors, authors, editors, copyeditors, production managers, designers. Each role sees what they need, admin sees everything.
Print-ready PDFs (trim sizes, bleed, back-cover copy), validated EPUBs, and ONIX-compliant distribution metadata. Ready for print-on-demand or traditional distribution.
Pronunciation guides, SSML exports, narrator notes, chapter-level markers. Your manuscript becomes audiobook-ready material without a second translation layer.
BookForge is a desktop app. It runs on your machine, against your files, using your Claude Code subscription. No file uploads, no cloud storage for your manuscripts.
Windows installer is live; macOS and Linux builds land soon. Works offline once set up. Your books stay in a folder on your disk — the same folder you'd use today.
BookForge uses Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI tool) on your machine to run the actual AI work. Your API calls hit Anthropic directly, billed to your account. We never see your prompts or your manuscripts.
Click a step, review the output, approve or request revisions, move on. Across every chapter, every book in your catalogue. Auto-continue mode lets whole volumes run in sequence while you focus on review.
BookForge is a desktop app — not a cloud service. Your project folders live on your disk. AI calls go from your machine to Anthropic directly, through your own Claude Code subscription. What we do see, for running the service: your email, anonymous step counts (so we can tell what's working in the beta), and crash reports with filesystem paths scrubbed. Full privacy policy →
No — and we built tools so you can be sure. The Agent Monitor shows the live cost of every running step, the cumulative spend across the session, and a token-velocity readout so you can spot a runaway turn the moment it starts. Every step that approves a result also logs its cost back to the project so you can see, per-chapter, exactly what production cost.
Drafting a typical 90 000-word novel through the full pipeline costs in the order of a few US dollars on Claude Pro pricing — not a dime more than you'd pay using Claude Code by hand, because the API calls go to Anthropic directly from your machine.
Yes. The whole point of BookForge is that it's a real GUI on top of a publishing pipeline — you click steps, you read output, you approve or ask for changes. There's no terminal, no prompt-engineering, no scripts to write. The only setup that touches the command line is installing Claude Code itself, which Anthropic ships an installer for.
If you've ever used Scrivener, Vellum, or Affinity Publisher, you'll feel at home. The skills under the hood are the technical part — the operator UI is intentionally not.
Yes — and you barely need to "export" because everything already lives on your disk. Each project is a folder. Inside it: your manuscript as plain markdown, your style guide, the entity bible, every artifact the pipeline produced (PDFs, EPUBs, metadata files), and a small SQLite database tracking step history. That folder is yours. Copy it, back it up, open the markdown in any other editor.
If you cancel your account, the desktop app stops talking to our cloud — but the project folder keeps working. We don't hold your files hostage.
The beta is free. After the beta, we'll roll out a paid plan for individual operators (priced like a creative-tool subscription, not like enterprise SaaS) and a separate plan for small publishing houses with multi-role workflows. Existing beta users will get advance notice and a transition path. Nothing flips to paid overnight — see the pricing page for details.
We store your account email, anonymous telemetry (step counts, model versions, cost rollups — never the content of your work), and crash reports with file paths scrubbed. That's it. Manuscripts, prompts, AI outputs — those go between your machine and Anthropic, full stop. Full breakdown lives in the privacy policy.
BookForge is in private beta while we harden the pipeline with real publishing houses. Free during this phase — grab the installer, or drop your email and we'll let you know when your platform is ready.