With AI, Romance Novelist's Books Are Done in 45 Minutes

If you're wondering how AI is changing publishing, look no further than romance veteran Coral Hart. In a piece for the New York Times, Alexandra Alter explains that the South Africa-based novelist has long been prolific, historically turning out up to a dozen books a year under one of five pen names (Hart is one she previously used). AI has electrified that.

She's settled on Anthropic's Claude as the best tool for cranking out love stories. And crank she did: more than 200 books in 2025 that she self-published on Amazon. She managed about 50,000 sales, bringing her six figures. Alter describes the ease: "While we spoke over Zoom, an AI program she was running ingested her prompts and outline and produced a full novel, about a rancher who falls for a city girl running away from her past. It took about 45 minutes."

Hart details how she gets around AI guardrails and blind spots—its lack of X-rated chatter and tendency to pick vanilla locations for sex, like the bedroom or shower, for instance: by banning overused words like "shiver," supplying out-there kink lists, and inventing ever-stranger sex-scene locations ("rooftop greenhouse").

Read the full piece for much more, including the challenges one writer finds with using AI to craft plus-size heroines, along with an AI quirk flagged by Alter: the over-use of the metaphor "like a ragged prayer" in AI-written romance novels.