Self-published author says she wrote 370 AI novels under 21 pen names
Coral Hart says she earned high six figures since 2025 writing the books under 21 pen names, as deals and prizes are pulled elsewhere over AI claims.
The Guardian Books reported that romance novelist Coral Hart has written 370 novels under 21 pen names using AI since 2025, earning what she described as "high six figures." Hart, who began self-publishing in 2012 and writes for Kindle Unlimited, said she knows of authors who hire more than a dozen ghostwriters to keep up with the platform's demand for frequent new releases.
A study led by Tuhin Chakrabarty of Stony Brook University, awaiting peer review, estimated that around one fifth of recently self-published books contain at least 25% AI-generated text. The outlet also reported a string of separate publishing disputes: Hachette withdrew the romance novel Shy Girl in March over evidence author Mia Ballard used AI, which Ballard said to the New York Times may have come from an editor she hired; Commonwealth short story prize winner Jamir Nazir was accused of AI use after readers ran his story through the detection tool Pangram, which he denies; Pangram concluded four regional prize winners since 2025 were likely to have used AI; and in July, agents for debut novelist Jerry Falade withdrew from a $2m (£1.5m) book deal after he was accused of using AI.
A class action lawsuit covering around 500,000 titles won a $1.5bn settlement from Anthropic last year over alleged unauthorized use of writers' work, with other similar lawsuits ongoing. Seventy prominent authors wrote an open letter asking the big five publishers to promise never to release machine-created books; the publishers did not make that promise.
I've built a career on telling it straight, so here it is: the fear in publishing right now is real, and so is the money being made quietly on the other side of it. A study awaiting peer review puts AI-generated text in roughly a fifth of recently self-published books — that's not a fringe, that's a fifth of the shelf. Nobody has clean hands to point fingers with yet, and anyone telling you this is simple is selling you something.
From the Coral Wire edition of Sun, Nov 15 2026 · Coral Index 75/100 (Green light)