South African Writer Uses AI to Publish 371 Romance Novels in 20 Months, Earning Over $1 Million

Coral Hart, a 40-year-old South African writer, has become a focal point in the debate over AI-assisted publishing. Since February 2025, she has released 371 romance novels in about 20 months with the help of AI tools, with cumulative sales surpassing 1 million copies. Hart says her income in 2026 has exceeded $1 million.

Hart, who has 14 years of experience in publishing, says she does not simply let a large language model generate complete manuscripts. Instead, she sets the story structure, character details, narrative style and chapter outline, uses a customized AI workflow to produce drafts, and then proofreads and adjusts the result. She has said that producing acceptable manuscripts requires carefully designed prompts, while asking a model to write freely tends to yield poor-quality text. Most of her books are tailored to specific reader groups based on market research.

The approach has drawn criticism from traditional writers who say she is flooding the market with mass-produced, AI "fast-food" works and undermining creative standards. Hart says she has received tens of thousands of abusive messages, has been called a "charlatan" and has faced death threats. She argues that readers keep buying her books because they meet a demand, and that AI is just a productivity tool, much like the typewriter was for earlier writers.

She now runs a team, has trained hundreds of people in her workflow, and plans to launch Authorythm, software for AI-assisted writers.