Coral Hart Tells Guardian She Has Written 370 AI Novels

Since 2025, Coral Hart has written 370 novels under 21 pen names using AI, and she told The Guardian she has earned "high six figures." Sophie McBain's report ran on 14 November 2026.

What she said about the books

Hart got her start writing for Mills & Boon, and in 2012 she began self-publishing. She sells through Kindle Unlimited. She told The Guardian the algorithm favours a new book at least once a month, and that on her own she can write 10,000 words a day.

"A bad writer or a bad storyteller is not going to get a good book out of AI," she told The Guardian. She said a writer still needs craft, structure, and a sense of what a reader wants.

"So, it's not taking the human out of the equation," she told The Guardian. "It's taking the friction and the time and the business blocks out of the way."

Hart is one of her pen names, The Guardian reported. She teaches courses on using AI to produce books, and she tells other authors not to disclose that use unless the law requires it. "The minute someone discloses [AI use] they get death threats, they get called names, they're ousted," she said. After she spoke to the New York Times earlier this year, she was doxed and faced death threats, the report says.

"I think the anger and hate comes from a place of fear," she told The Guardian. "I think people are very afraid of AI, and people in publishing are delusional in thinking that it's not going to overtake our industry, that their screaming on social media is going to stop it."

The counts, and the mood

A study still awaiting peer review, led by Tuhin Chakrabarty of Stony Brook University, estimates that around one fifth of recently self-published books contain at least 25% AI-generated text, The Guardian reported. The same report describes a class action involving around 500,000 titles that won a $1.5bn settlement from Anthropic. One group of 70 prominent authors asked Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan to promise they will "never release books that were created by a machine." They did not promise, the report says.

An unnamed literary agent told McBain the atmosphere is like "the wild west," The Guardian reported. Liz Gately, a New York book scout, told The Guardian: "We're at a time where it's all very much in flux, and I don't think anyone has good answers, but certainly everyone's talking about it."

Deals that came apart

In March, Hachette withdrew Shy Girl over evidence that Mia Ballard used AI, The Guardian reported. She told the New York Times an editor she hired may have inserted the text. Jamir Nazir, this year's Commonwealth short story prize winner, denies an AI accusation that followed a Pangram scan. Pangram concluded that since 2025, four regional winners were likely to have used AI, the report says.

In July, agents for Jerry Falade left a $2m deal, also given as £1.5m, The Guardian reported. He denied using AI except for research, and wrote that "culturally unfamiliar" English draws more suspicion. "I haven't seen this kind of investigative zeal directed at white authors accused of using AI," the report quotes him. "Apparently that level of scrutiny is reserved for a Black boy from Nigeria."

The Guardian says the writers at the centre of these scandals have been authors of colour. Last month Boréal dropped Thélyson Orélien after his novel left the Goncourt Academy longlist. He denied using AI on that novel and admitted plagiarism elsewhere, the report says.

Agents, detection, and the statute

Research cited by The Guardian estimates that Pangram is at least 95% accurate, with a near-0% rate of false positives. Hannah Bowman, who chairs an AI committee at the Association of American Literary Agents, told The Guardian that some agents want routine detection and others want to rely on trust. "I think it's a shame that all of these things are getting addressed so publicly," she said. "I worry for authors when they don't have a chance to make a case in defence of their work."

Natalie Lakosil, chair of that association's copyright committee, told The Guardian that US law requires a book to be "human authored" and treats machine-written text as public domain. "Which is why it's so problematic for publishers, because if it's AI, they have no protection, they can't have exclusive rights," she said. "The purpose of copyright protection is to protect human creation, to protect artists, and AI is not an artist."

In 2023 Stephen Marche wrote Death of an Author with three AI programs, The Guardian reported. "Publishing has both become incredibly moralistic and at the same time it keeps getting rocked by these scandals," he told The Guardian. He wants a "very clear moral line" on labels.

Doug Wallace, of Andrew Nurnberg Associates International, told The Guardian: "We're in the human creativity business, not in the business of giving robots jobs." A second Chakrabarty study, still awaiting peer review, found that MFA students in blind tests tended to prefer fine-tuned AI passages over classmates' work, The Guardian reported. The same report says the Prix Pascal de Littérature IA launched in France last month, and that a Times Literary Supplement piece on AI was taken down over allegations it had been written with AI.