The AI Romance Factory

Genre fiction publisher Inkitt has influential backers and a vision for infinitely customizable A.I.-driven content. What would be left for the human creators?

Manjari Sharma hadn’t written much when she decided to start a novel. She’d graduated from university during the Covid-19 pandemic and was reading romance stories to quell her restlessness while locked down in her parents’ house in Lucknow, India. One day she settled into bed and started typing one of her own.

Sometimes in the months that followed, her parents would drift into the yellow-walled bedroom where she liked to work, and she’d scoot over so they could get on the bed and watch the epic series Mahabharat on TV. They knew she was writing but didn’t know the details. Sharma—whose pleasure reading had made her an expert on American romance—was drafting a novel that started with an overweight, insecure American high schooler named Keily being tormented by a hot football player. (“‘You’re fat and dumb,’ James had said with a condescending smirk, ‘like a pig. I should call you Piggy.’”) It would end with them falling in love.

Sharma started publishing installments of the novel on Wattpad’s free platform, titling it Fat Keily; after it was done, seven months later, she also put it on another free platform called Inkitt, based in Berlin. In both places, the novel attracted lots of readers and rapturous comments—“Punctuation be damned! I absolutely love this story!”—and before long, Inkitt was proposing that she move the novel from its free platform to its premium subscription-based platform, Galatea, where Sharma would receive a share of sales. She agreed, and her novel, renamed Keily, took off again. In early 2024 she learned Inkitt wanted to turn it into a series.

This time there was a catch. Sharma recalls being told that she was welcome to write the next books if she could get them done within a few weeks. Otherwise, Inkitt would hire a ghostwriter to do it, though her name would still be on the cover and she’d still get royalty payments.

Sharma had no real choice; her contract with Inkitt gave it the right to do just about anything it wanted with Keily, including come up with sequels. Plus, her life had gotten busy in the years since she first drafted the novel. She’d gotten a master’s degree in mathematics and started an internship in artificial intelligence at the Royal Bank of Scotland. She accepted the ghostwriting offer.

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