Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025. That’s not a typo. Three hundred seventy, in about twenty months, nearly all of them with AI.
AFP’s Thomas Urbain sat down with her last week, and the story ran everywhere from the Straits Times to Philstar over the weekend. Hart is a pseudonym. She’s a South African romance writer who spent 14 years in publishing and wrote several dozen books the old way before she ever touched a model. Then she spent three months learning the tools and building a system. Now she plays the models off each other. ChatGPT is “really good at dialogue, terrible at prose.” Claude has “really good story structure.” Grok is “completely unhinged” but handy for the spicy scenes. Been there.
Her process goes like this. She sets the concept, the style, the characters, and the chapter outlines. The system drafts the whole book in one pass. AI runs developmental edits, then continuity fixes for dropped threads, flat middles, and eye colors that change halfway through. A human proofreader catches the “AI tells” that slip through. “And it’s usually ready to go.”
By her own estimate she’s sold over a million books and earned more than a million dollars this year alone. Most of the titles are built for specific readers off hard market research. She’s trained several hundred people in her method and is launching software for AI authors called Authorythm. Her reward for talking about it is “tens of thousands” of hate messages and several death threats.
So let’s get that part out of the way. Death threats over a book? No. Knock it off. She’s not hiding, and she’s right that nobody is unplugging this because a bunch of authors said so. Personally, I love AI tools. I’m old, they make me ten times more productive, and my bet is most people don’t really care much about how a book was made. They care about if they like the book. We made tools to help, just like we have done since the dawn of time. There are, no doubt, many things to consider at many levels if you’re worrying about the masters of AI production totally swamping out those that are just trying to write something they feel. It has always been hard to find financial success as an author. But the bottom line will always be the buyers. Most everyone that ever took pen in hand and wrote a story learned that getting someone else to read it is a far different kind of skill. Gapoz, in the Circle, doesn’t give a rat’s ass about those things. We’re about giving and getting real input about our writing so we can better respond to those sparks of imagination that drive us to express them in stories.
And she’s not wrong about the two-minute crowd either. “If you say, ChatGPT, write me a book… you’re going to get a flaming dumpster fire of trash.” Surprise. The tool doesn’t hand you a masterpiece without some effort. It is however, less effort, and a different skill set than writing. Whether that makes any difference to you depends on why you do it in the first place.
But here’s where I land. My problem was never the tool. It’s what you’re writing for. When the target is the market report, and the trope that’s trending, and getting the next 19 titles out this month, that’s a factory. A smart, honest-about-it factory, maybe. But the point is the money, and the book is the thing it ships in. She says she only mentions AI when a sales platform makes her. Fine. That’s her call. I’d just ask what’s actually yours in title number 371.
Listen, I’m a capitalist, and a staunch believer in freedom. I don’t like what she’s doing here. It’s not about a love of writing. It’s about a love of money. But, hey, people decide what they read, and if it was a secret, it’s not anymore. If she sells books, good on her. That’s what she’s about. That’s not my thing, even though I would like to have money :). But Gapoz, and Circle in particular, isn’t about making money. It’s about learning and improving craft. Fact is, I would welcome her to the Circle, and to the site overall. She has a lot we can learn from. As long as someone is honest about their submissions, and do NOT use AI to review the work of others, it’s allowed. Whether members like and support the results is, and should always be, a matter of personal choice. That’s the little world. Circle is built for people who write because they’ve got something to say and want to get better at saying it. Members request assignments. Reviews are structured and prompted and submitted right on the site, and they walk reviewers through various lenses and push them to say how a piece actually made them feel. Writers can revise and resubmit. The credit earned can go to your own work or to someone else’s. Use whatever tools you want. We ask one thing: be honest about how you use AI. We ask that before your first submission. It’s your word. If something goes sideways, the Hall of Justice sorts it out case by case.
If cranking out volume is why you write, Circle probably isn’t a good fit for you. If you want people who’ll actually read your stuff and provide personal and meaningful feedback to you, come find us at gapoz.com. The doors are open. Membership is limited to maintain community and performance. There’s no fee. Registration is open, subject to approval. Come meet people, make some friends, and grow your craft together.
Also on the beat
- European writers and translators refuse to sign the EU’s AI transparency code because EWC and CEATL say it’s full of loopholes for books (Publishing Times, Oct 25).
- After the Orélien affair, French publishers organize the hunt for AI with detectors, contract clauses, and talk of a “100% human” label (France 24, Oct 25).
- Authors say they paid Patrick White Publishing hundreds for “crap” service and undisclosed AI art, right down to AI storefront photos on Google Maps (ABC News, Oct 25).
- Sylvester Stallone defends his “half human, half AI” movie pitch: “If you don’t go with it, you will be trampled by it” (Variety, Oct 22).
- YouTube’s survey finds 72% of video posters use AI, and 61% want to put themselves in their content (Tubefilter, Oct 22).
How this was made
AI assisted research and a first draft of this Circle View. A human reviewed, edited, and is accountable for the judgment and the final take.
