A writer from South Africa told how she made a million dollars on books and AI

South African Writer Tells How She Made a Million Dollars on Books and AI

A South African writer who uses artificial intelligence to create novels reported that she has earned over one million dollars since the beginning of 2026. According to her, since February 2025, she has released 371 books and sold over one million copies in digital, print, and audio formats.

The author, who publishes under the pseudonym Coral Hart, shared this with the AFP agency. She writes primarily in the romance genre and uses several AI models to generate text.

According to Hart, when creating a book, she sets the plot, style, character traits, and chapter structure herself, and then uses ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok to generate the text. After that, the draft goes through several stages of editing, also with the help of AI, and is finally reviewed by a proofreader.

Before switching to neural networks, Hart worked in the publishing industry for 14 years and wrote several dozen works. She claims that mastering the AI tools and building her own workflow system took about three months. Currently, she also trains other authors in her method and is preparing to launch the Authorythm software program for creating books with the help of AI.

At the same time, her activities spark debate in professional circles. Hart is criticized for proliferating so-called "AI slop" — low-quality works created using neural networks. She said she has received tens of thousands of abusive messages and several death threats.

In response to the criticism, the author points to sales figures and believes that readers would return the books if they were bad.

Earlier it was reported that OpenAI plans to implement an invisible watermark into texts generated by ChatGPT to make it easier to detect content written by the neural network.