Translated with AI assistance
South African author Coral Hart published more than 370 books with the help of artificial intelligence in just 20 months – and she doesn’t consider this way of working something to be hidden.
Hart is a pseudonym; the author does not reveal her real name. Before experimenting with generative AI, she worked in the publishing industry for 14 years and wrote several dozen books the traditional way. Now, in her work, she switches between several models, assigning each its own specialization.
According to her, ChatGPT is «very good at dialogue and terrible at prose,» Claude is «very good at story structure but terrible at describing sexual themes,» and Grok has «absolutely no brakes» but is good at explicit scenes.
At the same time, Hart insists that simply asking a neural network to write a novel is not enough.
«If you simply ask ChatGPT or Claude to write a book from scratch, the result will be outright garbage: the models have nothing to rely on,» she says.
The author herself defines the idea, characters, style, and outline for each chapter, after which she uses different models for individual stages of the work. The final text goes through several rounds of AI editing and is then reviewed by a human proofreader.
The economics of the experiment look convincing: according to Hart herself, her books in digital, print, and audio formats have sold over 1 million copies, and her revenue since the beginning of 2026 has exceeded $1 million. One of her books made it into Amazon’s top 100, and most of her novels are created for specific reader niches based on demand analysis. Hart is now teaching her method to other authors and preparing to launch Authorythm, a program for AI writers. For critics, the author has an impenetrable argument: «The books sell.» According to her logic, readers simply won’t buy a bad text—or they will return it.
The debate surrounding AI literature, meanwhile, extends far beyond Amazon. Haitian-Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien found himself at the center of a scandal after his novel C’était ça ou mourir was removed from contention for the Goncourt Prize. The publisher Les Éditions du Boréal later stated that an investigation had confirmed the use of AI in the creation of the book, and it refused to reprint it or continue working with the author. At the same time, it proved impossible to determine exactly how much AI was involved.
Hart suggests looking at the problem differently: rather than dividing literature into «human» and «machine,» we should evaluate the final product. Her story shows just how quickly AI is changing not only the writing process, but also the economics of book publishing.
