Coral Hart has published 371 books in 20 months, and the AI author is not apologising

A South African writer working under the name Coral Hart has published 371 books since February 2025, most of them drafted by artificial intelligence, and she says she has taken tens of thousands of hate messages and several death threats since she began speaking about it publicly.

As eNCA reported on 23 October, Hart defends the method and has become a visible symbol of AI’s arrival in publishing, a position few of her peers are willing to occupy under their own faces.

Hart is a pseudonym. She is in her forties and worked in publishing for 14 years before she started writing with AI around 20 months ago, producing several dozen works without the technology in that time. She told AFP, whose interview underpins the eNCA report, that she spent three months learning the various models and building a framework that could produce a book.

Her description of the tools is specific rather than reverent. ChatGPT, in her account, is strong on dialogue and weak on prose. Claude handles story structure but not what she called sex drives. Grok she described as completely unhinged while useful for spicy scenes. Asking any of them to write a book outright, she said, returns a flaming dumpster fire of trash because the model has nothing to work with.

What she does instead is supply the material the model lacks. Hart defines the story concept, the style, the details of the characters and the chapter outlines, and her system generates from there.

The workflow has compressed. When she started, she said, a paragraph at a time was the limit and it usually took two or three prompts. She can now draft an entire book in one sequence. The models have improved vastly since last year, she said, in prose, syntax and sentence structure.

The first draft is still not good. It goes back through AI for developmental edits, then again to fix continuity problems, story issues, flat middles, incomplete character arcs, dropped plot threads and characters whose eye colour has changed. A human proofreader then reads the text to catch AI tells that slipped through and does some rewriting. After that, in her words, it is usually ready to go.

One of her novels reached Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers. The vast majority of the 371 titles, many of them romance, are aimed at specific readers on the back of market research. By her own estimate she has sold more than a million books across digital, print and audio formats and earned more than $1 million so far this year, roughly R17.6 million at around R17.60 to the dollar.

That figure is her own estimate and has not been independently verified.

Hart now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm. She publishes under more than 10 other pen names and mentions her use of AI only where a sales platform requires it. For the last 16 years, she said, nobody asked her what her creative process was.

She has been accused of contributing to AI slop, the term for low-quality machine-generated text, video, music and images. Her answer is commercial. Books are selling, she said, and readers do not read rubbish books, they return them.

She has followed the case of Haitian-Canadian novelist Thelyson Orelien, whose book was withdrawn from the shortlist for France’s Goncourt prize after accusations that he used AI, which his publisher confirmed on Wednesday. Hart said critics had praised the book and sales were strong before the controversy, and asked whether a reader who needs an AI label to hate something hates the book or hates the AI.

For South African readers the story lands in a local publishing economy that is small, thin on advances and heavily dependent on a handful of retail chains, with self-publishing through Amazon and similar platforms long established as a route around the gatekeepers. A writer who can produce a finished manuscript in weeks rather than years changes the arithmetic for everyone competing for the same shelf space and the same reader’s R200.

It also raises questions the local industry has not yet had to answer in public. Whether a book written this way should carry a label. Whether a platform should require one. Who proofreads, who edits, and who is accountable when a generated passage repeats someone else’s work. Hart’s position is that the disclosure question is already settled in practice, since she declares the use where a platform demands it, and that the argument about whether the technology belongs in publishing is one the technology has already won.

This is here, she said. They are not going to switch it off or unplug it because a bunch of authors said so.

Her own explanation for taking the abuse rather than writing quietly under a pen name is that the conversation has to start somewhere. I chose to be the one to step up and say, these are conversations we need to start having, she said.