Coral Hart

I'm Coral Hart and I write AI-powered romance novels that are topping Amazon charts.

So what happened was an author called Mia Ballard, an American author, self-published a horror novel called Shy Girl.

And the conceit of this book is it is about a woman who is down on her luck financially and decides to sign up for a sugar baby website.

In the hopes of fixing that, she gets put in touch with this man and enters his orbit.

And eventually he sort of kidnaps her and decides to keep her as a pet, like a dog in a sort of cage and on a collar and forbids her from speaking except to say woof and not to woof to actually say woof, which is a bit strange.

There we go.

During the course of this incarceration, she starts to take on kind of animal qualities and finds herself actually seemingly turning into a dog.

She self-publishes this book and it's popular among fans of self-published horror online.

And then what happened was, as often enough happens these days, is that a big traditional publisher, in this case Hachette, will see a self-published novel and...

see that it's popular and decide to then publish it again under the imprint of their own house.

And that can be a pretty good deal for the house and for the author because they get a book deal and a payment and the publishing house know that people like this book already and therefore it's likely to earn a profit.

So they do this, they contact her.

It then gets published in the UK by Hachette and is slated for publication in the US a little bit later than that.

People begin to read this book more widely now that it's out with a major publishing house and discussion begins to pop up on places like BookTok.

I was just reading sentences and I was like, that doesn't even mean anything.

And read it.

This conversation kind of gathers speed and people agreeing that there's something kind of off about the book.

And then it all gained a little bit more attention.

There was a user, a YouTube book person called Frankie Shelf, who made a three hour long video dissecting this book and all the things that they thought were...

gave the signs of being AI generated.