Chapter 1: What recent developments have occurred in the audiobook industry?
As I'm recording this, it's March 2026 and it's safe to say that this year's already seen significant developments in the audiobook industry. I'm thinking of two specific things that are definitely of interest to us, the consumers. One is obviously AI, AI narration and AI writing too. And the other one is Spotify shaking things up and genuinely presenting itself as a legit competitor to Audible.
Let's talk a little bit about where audiobooks stand as of spring 2026. This is Audiobook Cafe. I'm Jacob Chambansky. Red Sale is the host of My Life in Books on AMI-audio. He's on the show once every two weeks, connecting from London, UK. What's up, Red? Hi, Jacob. Yeah, all good here. Spring has sprung and I'm reading some great books. In fact, one of them is your recommendation.
Which one is that? Which recommendation? Project Hail Mary, which I know we're going to be discussing in a couple of weeks' time. You've taken me slightly out of my comfort zone, shot me into space, and I have to admit that I'm actually really quite enjoying it. It's quite a trip. It won an Audi back in the day. It is something that I just see recommended all over the place beautifully.
narrated um you can never get a narration as good as that through ai i am positive i want to talk about ai because there's been some development here in the past maybe six months or so that's really well highlighted by an article that i sent you and that i want to talk about here It's a pretty wild story that got a lot of negative reactions from a lot of people.
It's called Can AI chatbots write emotionally rich romance novels? It's a New York Times article. It talks to a couple different authors, but one of the main authors is Coral Hart, who was a traditional romance author. She wrote roughly about 10 books per year, which is a high output, a very high output to start with. But in 2025, she started experimenting with chatbots.
I think mainly Claude and partly Chad GPT in case you're curious. But in 2025, she created 21 different pen names and released 200 titles. Close to 200 titles, essentially creating a fire hose of content. And she kind of saw this as an experiment. And some of the numbers are pretty impressive. She sold 50,000 copies across all of those titles, which for any
given title that's not very impressive but all together to sell $50,000 that's good enough to make her six digits in profits but she's using AI all throughout and the details of this article are what make it fascinating I want to throw it to you. What were your thoughts on this? Because it is a long article that has a lot to say. It's a great article.
And actually, hats off to Alexandra Alter, who not only wrote it, but also narrates it for those of us who can't read it physically. And I think she reads it with just exactly the same amount of thought as she put into writing it. It's a really thoughtful article. And... Yeah, I was kind of shocked and surprised by the scale, by the sheer speed with which an AI can write a book.
But then I was also not so shocked and surprised because there is an element of twas ever thus. Authors have always used the latest technology to publish their books. Oh, yeah. As I'm sure we'll come on and discuss, actually, romantic fiction has always been at the forefront of technological advance. We have to remember that romantic fiction accounts for 25% of the fiction sales globally.
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Chapter 2: How is AI being used in romance novel writing?
Like, doesn't that say it all? 200 books in one year? Oh, yeah. I don't believe you. Like, I kind of don't want to read your work. On principle, if you're crapping out 200 books in a year, you're not putting much effort in it at all, whatsoever. Yeah, exactly. You're talking about a quick essay that's been dashed off rather than a dissertation, aren't you here?
I think she does say that she runs masterclasses in how to train your AI in... not just turning out complete and utter drivel. She has ick lists, as she calls them, things that it shouldn't say because they're too queasy. She has phrases to avoid. But I still agree. And as you said, she points out that you have to do a lot of editing to pull out
What is at the end of the day, it's emulation of human emotions. It is not actually emoting itself, the AI. It's not considering the emotion and considering how a human would react. It is considering the learnt behaviour that it has observed, for want of a better word, and emulating that. And I agree. I did actually have a bit of a glance through one of her books.
And I thought, even if this was read by a human voice, it lacks nuance. It doesn't sound like a human being speaking. It sounds too created, if you know what I mean. A little artificial. Yeah. When you read her book, I'm assuming that it was also AI narrated, but it's AI written and AI narrated.
It was, which is an unfair test, but it's interesting that none of these books actually has been narrated by a human being. Well, of course they wouldn't be, you know. If you're crapping out 200 books, that's an unreasonable amount of work to get all produced as human beings. narration. It would take like 10 times longer to record the audiobook than it was to actually write it.
Exactly, that's right. I also thought it was interesting how, you know, this, as I say, very good article by Alexandra Alter highlights the digital fingerprints that AI leaves across the work as well. And she said the one that just seems to have popped up in three books that she found was as the hero is in the throes of passion
With his paramour, he whispers her name like a ragged prayer, which I don't think any human would ever say. And yet, clearly, the AI was so pleased with itself that it decided to recycle it for various other people's books as well. Yeah, so this happens in all LLMs where there are just certain words and phrases that it really likes. Famously, LLMs love em dashes.
There's just certain words, like this article points out, that it just uses constantly. It's in scenarios that always end up happening and they use the same wording for it. Like after intimacy in these romance books, the characters will always end up tangled in the sheets, specifically tangled in the sheets. Yes.
And they it loves using words like explosive and crashes of waves of ecstasy, that sort of thing. They use these constantly because it's based on it was the data was trained on a set of books. And it like establishes its own style based on those books. But, you know, even real authors, they will use certain words weirdly often. It's kind of become their thing.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of AI authorship on literary quality?
almost and this gets me to think about who's actually benefiting from this who's actually enjoying the the injection of ai in literature and publishing and the people who are winning are obviously the big tech companies and the hustlers who are writing 200 books a year and there are exactly aiming for quality Absolutely.
And, you know, Coral Hart, as we've already said, you know, she's winning at both ends because she's running masterclasses in how to train your AI. Write Dirty With Me, I think, is one of her courses. How to Train Your AI to Write Sex Scenes. Look, yeah, some people are always going to get rich if they're early adopters. I mean, clearly the market's there if she has sold 50,000 copies.
reading them quite what the star reviews they're getting there for these books from the readers they seem pretty low i assume the ai companies are making money hand over fist because if you're using their it's expensive bots it's very expensive yeah i don't know is literature benefiting i my my benchmark for all of these things is if it encourages people to read then it's
a good thing, assuming it's not twisting people's minds in really perverse ways. And more readers is a good thing for an embattled publishing industry. I do worry the more rubbish coming out
into publishers' inboxes that's been created by AI is going to mean that they will miss the next great romantic novelist who's a real person because the editorial assistants will just be swamped by all this glop that's coming into their inboxes. But... Generally, good writing does find a publisher eventually.
So maybe poor, embattled, unpublished authors are just going to have to try even harder to get published in the future. But let's also remember that romantic fiction also helped launch
ebook publishing straight to ebook publishing and has kept self-publishing going for the last 20 years so you know and who's going to pay to have an ai book self-published hopefully nobody i don't think that having a glut of ai written and narrated audiobooks is going to be good for getting more readers
The benefit of AI narration specifically is that you could get more audiobooks created for niche titles, niche genres, which rarely get audiobook productions. I think that is a true positive and can actually lead to more books. But if you're trying to get new readers into reading,
but it's really hard to find these new quality books that'll actually get you engrossed and want to listen, why would they come back and listen to more books? Ultimately, we read books because we enjoy them. And if these books aren't enjoyable, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? I agree.
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Chapter 4: How does Coral Hart's AI writing experiment challenge traditional publishing?
See you soon. That was Red Sale. He's the host of My Life in Books on AMI-audio. And that's all the time for this edition of Audiobook Cafe. I'm your host, Jacob Chymanski. Happy listening.