South African Author Publishes 370 Books in 20 Months with the Help of AI

According to an interview with news agency AFP, South African author Coral Hart has defended publishing more than 370 books written with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) in just 20 months, despite facing criticism over AI-generated content, literary standards and the future of self-publishing. She says she will continue to defend the process despite a wave of online abuse.

Hart, who is in her forties and writes under a pseudonym to protect her real identity, said she had received “tens of thousands” of hateful messages and several death threats. Critics on social media have called her a “grifter” and a “villain”, and she has become a symbol of the growing presence of AI in the publishing industry. While few authors who use AI speak publicly about it, Hart said she chose to do so because the conversation needs to begin and the technology is not going away.

She told AFP that it took her three months to learn how to use different AI models and develop a workable process for producing books. Before turning to AI around 20 months ago, Hart had worked in publishing for 14 years and written several dozen books without the technology. She now switches between different tools, describing ChatGPT as strong at dialogue but weak at prose, Claude as good at story structure, and Grok as “completely unhinged” but useful for more provocative scenes.

Hart said simply asking AI to write a book produces poor results. Instead, she provides the system with the concept, writing style, character details and chapter outlines before asking it to generate a draft. She said that initially she needed two or three prompts just to produce a paragraph, whereas she can now draft an entire book in a single sequence. According to Hart, AI models have improved considerably since last year, particularly in prose, syntax and sentence structure.

She said the first drafts are generally weak, so they are put through AI-assisted developmental editing and continuity checks. These processes address problems such as flat middle sections, incomplete character arcs, abandoned plotlines and inconsistencies, including changes in characters’ eye colours. A human proofreader then removes remaining signs of AI-generated writing and rewrites passages where necessary.

Of Hart’s 371 titles, most of which are romance novels, the majority have been developed for specific readerships using market research, although one of her novels reached Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers. She estimates that she has sold more than one million copies across digital, print and audiobook formats and earned more than $1 million this year.

Hart publishes under more than ten additional pen names and discloses her use of AI only when required by a sales platform. Her company has also trained several hundred people in her methods and plans to launch software called Authorythm for authors who use AI. Frequently accused of producing “AI slop”, a term used to describe low-quality AI-generated content, Hart argues that sales are the real measure of quality. “Readers don’t read rubbish books; they return them,” she said.