puddleshark

Well, the New York Times did it again by dropping a controversial publishing article on Sunday morning. This time it was “The New Fabio is Claude,” a frankly blathering article about how generative AI is allegedly going to push human writers out of the creative writing business by flooding the market with sexy self-published romance books. Featured is South African author “Coral Hart,” who of course is only using a now-retired pen name in the article.[i]

(note: I am using endnotes rather than in-essay cites because I want to cite as many of these sources as I can without readers needing to click away.)

“Hart” claims a six-figure income from “more than 200 romances” that all in all “sold around 50,000 copies.” Impressive?

Weelll, maybe. My calculator shows that this averages around 250 copies sold per title, possibly less because I used the figures of 200 books and 50,000 copies. Hardly outstanding even for selfpub work, and the gloss on the actual numbers makes me raise a brow or two.

And the “six figures” she cites is…well, using the numbers of $100,000 and 200 titles, that’s an average of $500 per book. Of course, we aren’t told whether these numbers are net income or gross income, much less how much was spent on advertising, production, and so on. Meanwhile, Ms. Hart is selling a proprietary AI program that costs $80 to $250 a month. Additionally, the article goes on to mention her “Write Dirty With Me” AI writing course, with “around 20” attendees at—according to her website, a cost of $100 USD. That’s…$2000, for one class, and she had listed several options.[ii]

Methinks I smell a rat here.

An overreaction on my part? Perhaps. But I have been around the self-publishing world since 2011, and I’ve seen this sort of thing happening far too often. If anything, Ms. Hart is a latecomer to this particular scene, because two years ago I was seeing a class promoter (who shall remain nameless) pushing a “write with AI” class at $1000 per person. Doesn’t take many subscribers at that rate to make a decent profit.

Of course, we have Ms. Hart’s inflammatory comment of “If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?”

Needless to say, outstanding authors in the romance field such as Courtney Milan took to social media to deflate that particular comment. Chuck Wendig also took aim at that comment. [iii], so I figure it’s been hammered upon sufficiently by multiple people.

That said, this is a mentality I saw reflected far too many times by the mindset exhibited by the late 20Booksto50k writing crowd, where rapid release and fast money from writing novels was considered to be more important than writing quality. Again, I’ve been in the self-publishing ecosystem since 2011, and I’ve seen these notions of gaming the system come and go. Many of them are centered around a particular publishing outlet, Kindle Unlimited (hereafter KU), which allows readers to read as many ebooks as possible. The catch is that these ebooks (unless traditionally published) are only available on Kindle Unlimited/Kindle Direct Publishing. Self-published authors in the KU program are paid per pages read in KU, and from books sold on Amazon. They cannot publish the ebook anyplace else, for a minimum of 90 days.

Needless to say, the schemes to game that KU algorithm have been rife from the beginning. I can’t even begin to name them all because, as I discovered early in my career, I don’t write in the subgenres which are popular on KU, so I didn’t pay attention to them. But there’s been everything from redirects at the beginning of the book that take you to the back—therefore generating artificial page reads—to stuffing the book with random stuff (that’s an oldie and my old brain can’t quite remember the mechanics of that one). Let’s just say that the current AI novel-writing craze is just the latest version of gaming the KU algorithm.

Which…another interesting newsletter hit my inbox this morning. Romancing the Data put out a summary of romance best-seller trends, and a couple of statistics jumped out at me.

First, there was a rise in Big Five romance best sellers in the Kindle Store Monthly Top 100 Best Sellers in Romance (Paid) in 2025 (31%, up from 9% in January). There was a drop in self-published books, from 71% to 44%[iv] More than that, Kindle Unlimited books dropped from 91% in April to 74% in December.

Hmm. Granted, that’s based on the last few months of data, BUT…that suggests to me that despite some of the claims in the NYT article from those promoting the use of AI, readers are catching on to the problems with AI slop and, as a result, backing away from programs like KU that become loaded with it.

Meanwhile, those of us who are self-published and don’t use AI in any form struggle to be seen. My big experiment in 2026 is going to be focusing on developing more artisanal products, starting with my new release coming out on February 24^th, Vision of Alliance. Besides a hand-drawn map allegedly from one of the characters (who is apparently known for his lack of drawing ability—cough cough Your Humble Author resembles that person), I’m going to try to create some glossary terms and etc—after all, it is a fantasy novel. I’m also planning to release a hardcover edition as well as a paperback version.

As a parting thought, I’m going to leave you with this quote from a recent newsletter by Baldur Bjarnason (author of The Intelligence Illusion), Out of the Software Crisis: Have I Hardened Against LLMs?:

“The more I wrote about generative models, the more appalled I became at the response from the industry, to both my writing and that of others actively highlighting the risks. Few people who have any influence in tech and software seem to care about the harms, the political manipulation, the outright sabotage of education, the association with extremism, or the literal child abuse.”

You have to subscribe to Bjarnason’s newsletter to read the whole thing, but he raises a point few others have, about the tendency of generative AI models to skew toward, as he puts it “a piece of technology that obviously and seemingly deliberately played into and supported some of the worst elements of the human psyche.”

I hadn’t thought about those aspects in those particular terms.

Now, I do.

No generative AI in my books, please. I plan to hold to this stance as best as I can.

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Meanwhile, want to support my writing endeavors? My books are easily found on my new website, https://www.joycereynolds-ward.com. Or you can drop a coin or two into my Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/joycereynoldsward