Romance Novelist Coral Hart Says AI Helped Her Write 370 Books Under 21 Pen Names
Romance novelist Coral Hart has written 370 novels under 21 pen names since 2025, using AI, according to The Guardian. A pen name is a made-up name an author uses instead of their own, and a single writer can hold many of them at once.
Hart got her start writing for Mills & Boon, the British romance publisher. She began self-publishing in 2012, meaning she released books herself without a traditional publishing house handling editing, printing and sales. In 2015 she moved to self-publishing full-time.
She now says she earned high six figures from her AI-assisted books. She also says she can write 10,000 words a day without AI. Hart teaches courses on how to use AI to produce books, and she has offered that teaching to others who want to follow the same path.
Much of this income can come through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's subscription service. Readers pay a monthly fee to borrow titles from the catalogue, and authors in the programme are paid for the pages their books have read, not for each copy sold. That payment model rewards long books that readers finish, which is one reason the format has drawn so many writers.
Hart's public profile has come with a cost. She told the Guardian that she was doxed, meaning her private personal details were published online without her consent, and that she faced death threats after speaking to The New York Times earlier in 2026.
A study 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, roughly a quarter of their words.
The wider debate over AI and books has also moved through the courts. A class-action lawsuit, a case where a group of people sues together on behalf of many others, involving around 500,000 titles won a $1.5bn settlement from Anthropic, an AI company. The case concerned alleged use of writers' work without consent. In a separate step, a group of 70 prominent authors wrote an open letter calling on the big five publishers to promise they will never release books created by a machine. The big five are Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan.
For readers, the question of who wrote a book is getting harder to answer from the cover alone. Publishers, authors and the people who buy and borrow books are now working through what that means, and the rules are still being written.
