In an age where everyone in arts and literature is fiercely against AI, South African author Coral Hart says she has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence, and that her books have earned her more than $ 1 million this year, about R16.55 million. Coral Hart is a pseudonym, and she publishes under more than 10 pen names, mostly in romance. She says she has sold more than a million copies across digital, print and audio.

She turned to AI after her publisher cancelled her ghostwriting contracts to replace her with the same technology. "It worked," she wrote on Reddit.

Hart had worked in publishing for about 14 years and written several dozen books before she began using AI around 20 months ago. She says it took three months to learn the different AI models and build a system that could produce a complete book.

She now uses several of them for different jobs. She told AFP that ChatGPT is "really good at dialogue, terrible at prose", that Anthropic's Claude has "really good story structure", and that she uses other tools such as Grok for explicit scenes. Each draft is run through AI again for editing, and a human proofreader then reads it to fix "AI tells that have slipped through".

One of her novels reached Amazon's top 100 bestsellers, but most of her titles are written for specific groups of readers identified through market research. She says she mentions her use of AI only when a sales platform requires it. Her business now goes beyond her own books. Through PlotProse, a training and publishing tools platform for independent authors, she says she has trained several hundred people in her method, and she is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm.

The sales, revenue and copies sold are all her own estimates. Hart has been called a "grifter" and a "villain" online and says she has received threats.

MyBroadband reported Hart's revised earnings figure and her description of PlotProse. AFP, via France 24, interviewed her in Cape Town about her process, the criticism and her new software. Africanews set her case against a wider debate in publishing, after a novel was withdrawn from the shortlist for France's Goncourt prize over accusations that it was written with AI. "I chose to be the one to step up and say, these are conversations we need to start having," Hart said.

Hart's story is easy to read as a fight about whether AI books are art. The more useful reading for founders is about the business model. Her books are one revenue stream, but she is also selling the method through training and soon software, the same pattern we saw with Max Blade's hivecoding, where the public experiment is also the marketing. In a gold rush, the person selling the tools often earns the most reliably.

Two open questions sit underneath. The first is disclosure. Hart tells readers about AI only when a platform forces her to, which is the same gap behind Samro's new AI rules for musicians. The second is ownership. South Africa's Copyright Act already says the author of a computer-generated work is whoever made the arrangements to create it, a clause no court has tested on tools like these.

Hart's three months building her system, her market research and her human proofreading are the kind of arrangements that law may one day be asked to weigh.

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