What AI-authored Books Mean For The Publishing Industry

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0:37Imagine you're in a bookstore and you wander over to the fiction section. There you find two shelves, one for human-written novels and one for novels written by AI. That future may not be as far off as you think. Roughly 4 million books were published in the U.S. in the last year alone. That's a more than 32 % increase from 2024, according to the trade magazine Publishers Weekly. It's unclear how many of those books were written using AI, in part because software used to detect AI writing isn't always 100 % effective. And the vast majority of those 4 million books published in 2025 were self-published, making it even more difficult to know the true number of books written using AI.

1:20Later, we hear from a self-published romance author who uses AI to write her novels. I look at it this way. AI can't unlearn what it's learned. So it's learned from my books, from all of the books and everything out there. I'm embracing this tool. I genuinely don't think it will go away. But AI isn't only showing up in self-publishing. Hachette, one of the largest publishers in the U.S., canceled the publication of one of its novels, Shy Girl. That's after allegations emerged that the author used AI to write it. The book was originally self-published and then acquired by Hachette. This incident isn't the only one involving AI.

1:58to rock the publishing world, but it marks a turning point. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Today, what are the ethical and legal concerns of using AI, which is often trained on copyrighted books, to write new ones? And in an already crowded market, how will lowering the bar for writing books affect readers who are already faced with millions of options? We'll get answers to those questions and more after this short break. Stay with us.

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4:25Welcome back to the 1A podcast. We're talking about AI in publishing and book writing. Let's get into the conversation and meet our panel. Joining us in studio is Derek Newton. He's a writer and journalist covering professional and academic fraud and AI. He's also the founder of Verify My Writing, a platform to distinguish AI written work from human written work. Derek, Thank you for having me. Also with us is Alexandra Alter. She writes about books, publishing, and the literary world for the New York Times. Alexandra, great to have you. Thanks for having me. And Andrea Bartz. She's a reporter and New York Times bestselling author of several novels, including The Lost Knight, The Herd, and We Were Never Here.

5:05Andy, it's great to have you. Thanks so much for having me. So, Alexandra, let's start with this story about Hachette. Again, it's one of the biggest publishing companies in the U.S. They canceled the debut horror novel, Shy Girl, in March, and this was in response to allegations that the author, Mia Ballard, used AI to write it. Tell us more about what happened. This was a sort of case that everyone was waiting for. People were anticipating that at some point a book that was written with the assistance of AI would slip through the editing process and get put out by a major publisher because it's become so common in self-publishing and the technology has evolved so quickly.

5:44So in this case, Mia Ballard had self-published the book previously, and this is a very common thing in publishing too. It got a lot of attention. It was picked up by Hachette. It was actually published in the UK. But readers started noticing strange things about the prose, kind of weird repetitions, kind of metaphors and similes that didn't really make sense. And there was a lot of conversation online about whether or not the author had used AI to write the book. So all of this was happening while, you know, the publication process was going forward in the U.S. And at a certain point, I believe, you know, the U.S.

6:20publisher Hachette and probably in the U.K. as well, they started looking into these questions and did their own internal investigation, which they wouldn't really detail for us, but they explained that it was a lengthy process and thorough, and they decided not to move forward with publication. I should note that Mia Ballard, in response to questions from us, did say that she herself did not use AI, that it was someone she had hired an associate to edit the book, not anyone at the publishing house, but somebody when she was working on the self-published version. So there's still a lot of questions about to what extent AI was used and how thoroughly it was vetted by Hachette when they started to look into it.

7:00But it was a big deal because this is the first time, as far as I know, that a major publishing house has pulled a book because they saw evidence that AI was used. And we should know that we reached out to Hachette for comment, but they didn't reply. Derek, why do you think this moment is particularly significant? Well, I think we're at an inflection point for basically a large community here, writers who are producing content, agents and publishers who are responsible for delivering it to the public, And for readers, the market has shifted dramatically and very quickly without really any guidance, without any rules, without any signposts for what publishers are supposed to do, what writers are supposed to do, what readers can expect.

7:49And so I think this shy girl development, the developments around it are important because it's one of the first things we've seen where a publisher has basically set their own rules and taken action and said that at least in this situation, under these circumstances, this publisher was not going to release it to the public. They had concerns or issues about it and decided to act accordingly. And I think and honestly hope that this sets a standard for other publishers as well, that there is a line somewhere that publishers and agents will recognize and act accordingly. Well, we'll get more into where that line is in the conversation.

8:32But, Andy, I want to turn to you. You were the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic for copyright infringement. The company used an estimated 500 ,000 books to train its AI model, Claude, without the consent of the authors. And your novels were among those 500 ,000. So first, how did you feel when you discovered your writing was being used to train Claude? I can remember the exact moment that The Atlantic had made one of those databases of pirated e-books that the AI companies had used to train their algorithms searchable. They had made a searchable database. base. So I typed in my name.

9:08And when my books came up, I remember feeling just profoundly violated. These were books that I had worked on for years that I had put my, you know, blood, sweat, and tears into that I had labored over. And to see them just kind of sucked up without, you know, consent, as you said, but also compensation just felt like a huge violation, like worse than having a wallet stolen out of my bag, worse than anything else. This is my intellectual property that really came from the heart. Had Anthropic on the front end said, hey, we're going to offer you this compensation model if we can use your book to train Claude, would you have said yes?

9:45I would have. I absolutely would have considered it. And I wish they had so that every author would have the ability to make that decision for themselves. But it was really clear from everything that came out in Discovery that they knew that they could just pick it all up and run and it was going to be a easy and cheap move for them. So they didn't. It's almost irrelevant that, you know, whether I would have said yes or no to them offering me compensation and asking me to opt in is irrelevant because they just barreled forward with all of our stuff, our stolen books. Well, they ended up settling with you and other authors for 1.5 billion with a B dollars.

10:24And it was the first of its kind case. What precedent do you think that's set for how we think about ownership and theft when it comes to AI and literature? Yeah, I think it's a really important first corrective step. I hope it's the first of many steps because obviously they are not the only AI company that made decisions like this. I hope that it's also a shot in the arm for everyone who feels like AI is just this tsunami, this sort of impenetrable force that we're all being told we need to use it at work, You have to accept it in all the apps that you download and everything you use on your laptop now.

11:00I hope that this was an uplifting moment to say we have a little bit of power together. These are not, you know, unstoppable forces. And we can make decisions and we can stand up for ourselves, even as, you know, David facing Goliath in the face of these big companies. Well, we got this message from Sarah who says, I don't know what to look for to tell me a book was written by something like Copilot, besides obvious signs of the program not checking its work. That said, I applaud Hachette for canceling Shy Girl. There are some pretty formulaic books out there today. Those books at least have emotion behind them.

11:32The author can explain why they wrote a scene the way they did. A program can't do that, and we are fools to pretend that LLM-generated work is at all acceptable or capable of measuring up to real creativity. Alexandra, for people who aren't in publishing, who aren't writers or perhaps, you know, prolific readers, the stakes of this conversation might feel a little nebulous. So to your mind, why do you think this conversation matters? Why do you think it matters that we ask about the use of AI in writing books? Yeah, I think it matters. when readers have the choice to decide, okay, I would love to read something written by a human or I'm curious, can AI write a good story?

12:17I'll check this out. I think some might be curious and want to read something generated by AI. But my impression from comments I've seen online and from my conversations with readers is that one of the things that draws people to books is the opportunity to connect with another human mind. And most people like that human connection and would opt for that, you know, given the choice. And I also think at some point it's going to affect the marketplace more than it has already. So, you know, there are many, many talented self-published authors who have a lot of readers who are very devoted to these authors.

12:55And they're finding it more and more difficult to maintain visibility on Amazon because there's just this flood of content. and some of those, some debut authors or people who are just starting out in their careers might have a hard time finding an agent or an editor who will take them on because they've been flooded with AI slop in their submissions or they're just more nervous about taking a risk on an unknown writer in this environment. So I think the kind of add-on effects of this could be really consequential for the literary ecosystem if we're thinking about whose voices get heard and who gets published, and that will eventually affect readers.

13:34It will affect what kinds of stories they can find in bookstores. Let's pause here. We have to take a quick break. But when we come back, we hear from a romance writer who uses AI. She's used it to write 200 novels in the last year. We'll be right back.

13:54This message comes from Working Forests Initiative. In American Working Forests, their professionals, from GIS analysts to biologists and even accountants, are committed to planting more trees than they harvest. They all have a role to play in planting for the future. Together, they aim to plant more than 1 billion seedlings in American Working Forests every year. They believe that protecting their working forests for tomorrow starts with planting more than they harvest today. Learn more at WorkingForestsInitiative.com This message comes from Grainger. This is the story of the one. As a procurement manager for a hospital system, she keeps every facility in her network stocked and ready.

14:34That's why she counts on Grainger to be her single source for thousands of products, from disinfectants to lighting, air filters, and more. And with fast, dependable delivery, Grainger helps her keep every facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Granger for the ones who get it done. We're talking about how AI is changing and challenging the book publishing industry. We'll hear more from our panel in a moment, but I want to introduce a new voice into our conversation. Earlier this week, I spoke with Coral Hart. She's the author of hundreds of romance novels written with AI and published under more than two dozen pen names.

15:16She teaches other writers how to use AI through her program, Plot Prose. Here's an excerpt of that conversation. so i first just want you to walk us through the process of how you use ai to write your romance novels how does that work it evolves all the time because ai changes almost daily but right now i have two systems that i work with both of which start with first doing the legwork looking at the market what's selling what readers want or what's popular what tropes what market what genre is it hockey romance? Is it baseball romance? Is it romantic? What's working? Once I know what's working, I build up a trope map, which is what I've done even before AI.

15:58I come up with my story seed. I build my idea myself. It's always my idea. I'll never run out of those. From my idea, I build a beat sheet. I look at the story structure, make sure I have the right story structure build a beat sheet build my character cards build my setting then from beat sheet to outline and then depending on what system I'm using from outline to draft if I'm drafting with Claude or one of the LLMs it's a very much babysitting it through the drafting process because you can't say hey Claude write this book that results in a lot of weird nonsense that you can't use or publish or fix.

16:43So I then draft chapter by chapter with Claude and then go into a exactly as I would have done with my first draft before. If I'm not working with Claude, if I'm working with the author rhythm system, my outline is built in such a way that I can then ask the system to generate the first draft for me. When did you start using AI to write books? Was there a prior to AI author experience? Yes. So I've been doing this for 16 years. I was traditionally published. I was hybrid published. I was indie published. I've been a six-figure author. I've paid my bills writing romance novels since 2010. I didn't just wake up and decide, I'm going to be a romance writer with AI.

17:26But I saw that this was going to be a disruptor in our industry, just like Kindle was, Kindle Unlimited, e-books. We've gone through many changes over the years. and in February last year I made the choice to learn. I wanted to see first of all if it was possible, if readers would read it, was it able to write a good book. On its own it's definitely not. I've really spent 16 years learning everything I can learn about my industry. Now I'm taking everything I've learned and using this new tool to be able to accelerate. I do think this is one of those changes in the industry that if you are not going to at least learn, you're not going to make it out the other end of this unscathed.

18:15So you wrote over 200 books using AI last year. Do you disclose to readers that you used AI to help write those books? No, I disclose to Amazon, which is required. I disclose on every platform that requires it. There's no requirement that says I have to disclose I wrote my book with AI or I wrote my book with a 2H pencil or I wrote my book on a MacBook or I wrote my book on a PC. I did not do that, number one, because the minute I did disclose it, I received about 14 ,000 death threats in one day. But also readers didn't know the difference. I'm saddened to hear that you faced death threats for that disclosure.

19:02I'm curious to hear more about, though, how you view the creative side of this. In 2025, as you know, hundreds of authors sued the AI company, Anthropic, for using 500 ,000 copyrighted books to train its AI model, Claude. They did that without the consent of the authors of those books. And the company settled with the authors for$1.5 billion, with the B, dollars. So the courts have essentially decided that what Anthropic did was a kind of creative theft. So first, did you agree with that ruling? So the ruling wasn't about the copyright. They said the copyright was fair use, but Anthropic was in trouble because those 500 ,000 books were obtained through pirated websites and they had stored pirated works.

19:50I have tried to get an eye to copy someone's work. It won't. I've tried to get it to rewrite Harry Potter. It tells me I'm not allowed to do that. There are lines to stop direct plagiarism. These companies, Google, all of them, they have had our data since the beginning of the internet. They just didn't know what to do with it. Now they know what to do with it. They're using it and some people are upset. So for authors who say, listen, I did not agree to have my work used to train these large language models and for someone else to then use AI to write books to whatever degree they're using it and then sell those books for a profit, that feels like creative theft to me.

20:47These may be conversations you're having with authors who are feeling exactly that way. How do you respond to their concern that you're building a literary career with their work as the foundation without, again, without their consent? My very first book was inspired by another author's work. In fact, it was probably as close to fan fiction as you could get. as any kind of artist or creative, we are somehow influenced by other work. There is no original book idea in this whole world. There's no trope that hasn't been told. There's no story that hasn't been told. It's how you tell it. Do you see it?

21:28So are you going to go back and pay everyone you got an idea from? But Coral, I'm curious if you see a distinction between the creative process of being what I hear you saying, describing as sort of a type of inspiration, right? Being inspired by a work and then developing an idea from that inspiration and how you're using AI. I still have to come up with the idea, right? It's so interesting. We talked to a lot of authors on this show, and so many of them talk about how writing for them is about this really beautiful process of discovery, that their characters reveal themselves to the author over time.

22:13The story reveals itself to them. Having had an experience of writing prior to using AI, do you feel like you've lost some of that experience? No. Okay. So I started out as a penster. I started out as that author where I just had this little inkling of an idea and I sat down and I winged it. And I very quickly learned that that's a great way to write books that I love and a very terrible way to write books that are going to be bought by readers. What I'm not doing is forcing myself to write two, three, five, 10 ,000 words every single day by hand, giving myself chronic carpal tunnel and tears and sleepless nights over a first draw.

22:58But some people would argue that that is what makes you a writer. It is the sleepless nights. It's the discipline and the tears. But I'm hearing that that's not the way you think about it. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided art, writing needs to be hard. I don't want to wake up and have to do a job that's hard every single day. I want to do a job that brings me joy. By using AI in my process, I've taken the parts of my job that were hard and made them easier. But I'm also hearing that what you've done in using AI is also create a business model for yourself that I'm assuming has helped this be a more lucrative exercise for you.

23:56In a recent interview with the New York Times, you said, quote, if I can generate a book a day and you need six months to write a book, who's going to win the race? So what's the race you believe writers are in right now? What happens when traditional publishers get tools like this? Where does that leave writers? And I explained writing, art. Writing is creative. Publishing is a business. A publisher is making business decisions. If they have a tool that eliminates the need to pay out huge advances, that cuts their costs, that cuts their production timeline from six months or a year to a week, what is the smart business choice?

24:40If it wasn't a publishing business and it was a tech firm or an accounting firm or any other kind of firm, what business decision would they make? I want to briefly touch on the market more broadly. More than, well, roughly 4 million books were published last year. The vast majority of them were self-published. And so we know that publishing is already facing this issue with discoverability. When the market is flooded with millions of books, it can make it difficult for readers to find the ones they'll enjoy. So are you concerned at all that writers like yourself who are producing hundreds of books in a short time frame are actually hurting their chances and other writers' chances of being found by the right readers?

25:31Yes and no. Number one, good books will always float to the top. Do you think that's true? You think it's true that good books will eat? Always? I think a reader will read one rubbish book by an author and then never read them again. Successful authors know how to build a bridge from their books to their readers. And that has always been the case. So you said yes and no. That's the yes. What's the no? I think we're going to see a lot more books available. and we are going to see niched books available. So we're going to see audiences spread out. So we're going to see readers being able to find exactly what they want and stick with it, which means the discoverability is going to get harder.

26:21But I've always believed that as authors, we are only as good as our marketing plan. And I had huge success before AI. On my real name, I'm an award-winning author. I've won the highest award for romance writing in my country. And I know which parts of writing a book I love and which parts make me want to smash my head on the desk every day. So I'm leaning into what I love and what I'm really good at and now using AI to assist me in between. Why do we as authors think that by pushing back against this, we are going to be able to stop it? And is that beneficial to us? Well, that's romance writer Coral Hart.

27:11Coral, I really appreciate your time. Thanks for speaking with us. It's a pleasure. Still with us are writers Andrea Bartz and Derek Newton and New York Times reporter Alexandra Alter. Andrea, I want to come to you first. I'd love to hear your response to what we heard there from Coral? I have quite a few notes jotted down. A few things that I want to focus on, though. I'll start with the Anthropic lawsuit because obviously I'm very involved with that. So Coral is correct that the judge in this case decided or declared that if Anthropic had obtained these books legally, it would have been okay for them to feed them into the algorithms to create these LLMs that we're all using.