A South African writer using the pen name Coral Hart says she has published more than 370 novels with the help of AI since February 2025, selling over a million copies and earning more than $1 million this year. The figures are her own and have not been independently verified.
Hart told AFP she turned to AI after a publisher cancelled her ghostwriting contracts in order to replace her with the same technology. She spent three months learning different models and building a framework to produce novels.
How the books are made
Hart starts by defining each book’s concept, style, characters and chapter outlines. Without detailed prompts, she said, large language models produce poor stories.
She relies mainly on Anthropic’s Claude, alongside other models. In a Reddit discussion, she said ChatGPT is good at dialogue but weaker at prose, Claude is strong on story structure but poor at intimate scenes, and xAI’s Grok handles explicit content well.
When she began, the models could only manage a paragraph at a time. Now they can draft a whole novel in one sequence. First drafts “aren’t good,” she said, and go through several rounds of model-based editing before a human proofreader removes “AI tells that have slipped through” and does some rewriting.
“I wanted to see what the potential was. Could I get six figures just by upping output and cutting paid ads? It worked,” she wrote.
Sales and a business
One of her novels reached Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers, though most are aimed at narrow readerships. Hart also runs PlotProse, a training and publishing platform for authors who want to use her methods, and is preparing to launch Authorythm, software for AI-assisted writers.
Earlier this year, the New York Times reported Hart had produced more than 200 novels and sold about 50,000 copies. Her latest figures suggest output and sales have accelerated sharply since then.
Hart has faced a fierce backlash, with critics calling her work “AI slop.”
Based on reporting by Newsday and AFP.
