Firn for illustrated books
The book is already in your head. Get it onto a page.
You have the story: a cast, a world, a shape for the whole thing. What you do not have is the months it takes to draft every chapter, commission illustrations that still match your characters twelve chapters later, and turn all of it into a file a store will actually accept.
Firn does that part. You end up with a real book — chapters in your voice, illustrations of your actual cast, and a file that opens on any e-reader.
You are the author, not the reviewer. Nothing gets written into your book without you seeing it first, and you can always go back to how it was.
Free to start. Reflowable EPUB export is free. Everything you make is yours, full commercial rights.
Chapters in your voice
The Writer drafts from the outline you approved.
Once you have signed off on the outline, the Writer takes a chapter at a time — knowing your genre, your cast and the rules of your world, rather than starting cold. What lands is real prose, three thousand words and up, not a paragraph you then have to expand yourself.
It proposes. You keep, cut, or rewrite. The draft is a starting point you direct, not a finished book handed down.
Plates that match the cast
Illustrations locked to the people who appear in them.
The Illustrator draws from the same character sheets every time, so the face in the frontispiece is recognisably the same person in the final chapter — instead of a different stranger every time you ask.
Every plate attaches to the canon. It is part of the world bible, not a loose file you commissioned once and lost track of.
Open it anywhere
A reflowable EPUB 3: the free export.
Your chapters come out as an ordinary EPUB — the format Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books all read. The text reflows, so readers pick their own size and typeface, and the styling is left plain and simple enough that you can change it.
- The whole book in reading order, so a store or a reader knows what it has
- One file per chapter, so readers can set their own text size
- Your illustrations travelling with the chapters they belong to
- Styling left plain and readable, so you can make it look like yours
Reflowable EPUB is free to export. When you want it on paper (a print or review copy), a PDF export is part of the premium tier.
my-novel.epub/
├── mimetype
├── META-INF/
│ └── container.xml
└── OEBPS/
├── content.opf # what's in the book, and in what order
├── toc.ncx # the table of contents
├── styles.css # how it looks - change anything
├── chapter-01.xhtml
├── chapter-02.xhtml
├── chapter-03.xhtml
└── images/
└── plate-01.png # your illustrationsRead mode
A real reading room, before you ever export.
Read mode is not a preview pane. It is somewhere to sit and read your own draft the way a reader would meet it. Character and place names are links, so you can check who someone is without losing your place.
Set it up to read the way you like: curated fonts, text size, and light or dark theme. Read mode unlocks the moment a single chapter has drafted prose.
Author pen mode
Edit one chapter. Your taste carries to the rest.
In Read mode you can pick up the pen: strike a line, reword a phrase, leave a note on a chapter. Firn reads those edits as a taste profile and cascades a re-polish across your drafted chapters to match, so a voice correction you make once doesn't stay stranded on page one.
You are still the one holding the pen. The cascade proposes a polished pass in your direction; nothing changes without a stage you approved.
One world bible under the whole book.
Every character, place, and plate lives in one canon. Rename a character once and every chapter that mentions them updates; you never grep your own manuscript for a name you changed your mind about.
The Editor
Continuity is a job with a name on the work. The Editor checks names against the canon, watches the timeline for events that slip out of order, and flags tone that drifts from the book you set out to write: the breaks a long manuscript actually makes.
You are the author. Say so.
Storefronts increasingly ask self-publishing authors to disclose AI assistance. Good. Firn keeps an activity ledger of the crew's work in the studio, so you can answer plainly about what was drafted, what you directed, and what you rejected: disclosure as a practice, not a confession.
And if you want to keep the writing entirely your own, Firn still earns its place: use it for the world bible, continuity, and the reading room, and draft every word yourself.
The same canon, another shape