South African author and founder of PlotProse, Coral Hart, has written over 370 books since February 2025, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to generate books based on her prompts.
She started using AI to write as an experiment after a big publisher cancelled her ghostwriting contracts and replaced her writing with AI. She estimated that she made $1 million (R16.55 million) in 2026.
“I wanted to see what the potential was. Could I get six figures just by upping output and cutting paid ads? It worked,” Hart wrote in a thread on Reddit.
In the same thread, she explained that she combined various AI tools but relied primarily on Anthropic’s Claude and her own writing experience.
Hart said these methods enabled her to produce hundreds of romance novels across 21 pen names and generated “high six figures” in US Dollar revenue. She revised this to over a million in a later interview.
She said she used pen names, including “Coral Hart”, to protect her children from trolls on the Internet and to separate her work by genre.
Speaking to AFP, Hart said she began working with AI around February 2025 and that it took her three months to familiarise herself with the various models and build a framework required to produce a book.
She said she combined various models and described ChatGPT as being good at dialogue but terrible at prose, while Claude is good at story structure but “terrible at sex drives”.
She said Grok was “completely unhinged” but good at creating “spicy scenes”. When approaching a new story, Hart defines the concept, style, character details, and chapter outlines.
She explained that, without something to work off, a large language model (LLM) will produce poor-quality stories. Only after she has provided details will her system generate a book.
Hart said that, when she started, the system could only write one paragraph at a time and that it took two or three prompts to get it right. Now she can draft an entire book in a single sequence.
Coral Hart, romance author and PlotProse founder and lead educator. Credit: The Coral Hart Group
Hart explained that the first draft of a book generated using AI generally isn’t good and must be run through several more rounds of model-based developmental edits and other fixes.
At the end of the process, the final AI draft is then proofread by a human to identify any “AI tells that have slipped through” and do some rewriting before the book is good to go.
One of Hart’s novels made it onto Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers list. However, she explained that the vast majority of her books were tailored to specific audiences based on market research.
She estimated that she has sold more than one million books, which she says has earned her more than $1 million (R16.55 million) so far in 2026.
The writer founded her own company, PlotProse, in January 2020, where she is the lead educator. PlotProse offers training for more people to write books using her method.
PlotProse is also preparing to launch software for AI authors, called Authorythm. She explained that the firm focuses on writing craft, AI systems, building foundations, and creating workflows.
“PlotProse is a romance author training and publishing tools platform that helps indie authors build scalable, AI-powered publishing businesses,” Hart wrote on her LinkedIn page.
“As a founder, I design and deliver 19+ live workshops per year, covering AI writing tools, Amazon optimisation, book marketing, cover design, and multiple income streams.”
It provides a suite of platforms designed to cover an author’s entire commercial year: researching, writing, launching, and selling their titles.
“Our team turns the concept you build with Coral Hart into finished, upload-ready books under our editorial process,” The Coral Hart Group says.
“Every book has a full draft of up to 50,000 words, an editorial pass, a human beta read, your cover, blurb, and Amazon metadata.”
Source: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/business/673738-south-african-woman-made-r16-55-million-in-less-than-a-year-using-ai-to-write-romance-novels.html
