Use AI to write success stories, a new side hustle on Amazon

By: Kuller, Deep Tide TechFlow

Mass-producing self-help books with AI is becoming the most popular side hustle on Amazon.

From May to October last year, an author named Noah Felix Bennett published 74 books on Amazon. They were paperback books priced at $11.99 each—things you can order and have shipped to your home.

The topics covered by the books he writes are extremely wide-ranging: porn addiction self-recovery guides, single-mother parenting handbooks, workplace bullying response manuals… Whatever topics have search demand, he writes about them. For example, he first released a book called “How to Play with Your Wife’s Mind” (roughly translated as “How to Manipulate Your Wife’s Mind”). Right after that, he released “How to Play with Your Husband’s Mind” (How to Manipulate Your Husband’s Mind)—catching both men and women.

Then he followed with a book called “Toxic Love: How to Break Free from an Emotionally Abusive Relationship” (toxic love). First it teaches you how to manipulate your spouse; then it teaches you how to escape an emotionally abusive, manipulated marriage—so the product line closes the loop…

From September 29 to October 1 last year, Bennett released a five-book series called “New Year, True You” within three days.

But he isn’t the most aggressive.

In the same category, the author with the highest output is named Richard Trillion Mantey; the “Trillion” in his name means “trillion.” Over three months, he released 14 books. As of early December last year, he had a total of 397 books listed on Amazon. This person shows up on camera and hosts a podcast in his own name, using his own photos—like he’s openly and legitly building a business.

Most of Bennett’s books have only one or two reviews—nothing like bestsellers.

But at $11.99 per book, the writing cost is nearly zero. Even printing via Amazon’s print-on-demand service is nearly zero. As long as occasionally someone searches, clicks in, and places an order, it’s pure profit.

My name is AI, expert at mass-producing self-help success

This isn’t an isolated phenomenon.

On January 28 this year, AI content detection company Originality.ai released a research report. They scanned 844 new books that were listed on Amazon in the fall of last year in the self-help success category. For each book, they checked three parts: the product description, the author bio, and sample pages from the body text.

The result: 77% of the books’ main text is likely generated by AI.

If you loosen the standard to “at least one part was written by AI,” the proportion rises to 90%. Even the product descriptions are likely written by AI 79% of the time. In other words, not only is the book written by AI—so is the sales copy used to sell the book.

The author bios are even more interesting. In 63% of cases, the authors either didn’t include a bio at all or had bios shorter than 100 words. Among the remaining authors who did have bios, nearly one-third of those bios are also AI-generated.

There are clear differences in word choice and style between books written by AI and those written by humans. AI books tend to favor cold, functional words in their titles, such as Blueprint, Strategies, Master, Mindset, and Habits—like they were spit out from the same template. Human authors are more likely to use emotional words like Purpose, Journey, Life, Love.

In the product descriptions, the differences are even more dramatic. The phrase “Step into”: AI used it 67 times, while human authors used it only once. AI also especially loves putting emoji in the descriptions—check marks, books, sparkles, and so on. 87 AI authors did this, but only 5 human authors did.

The report also includes another detail, which you could call dark humor.

Of the 844 books that were detected, one is titled “How to Write for Real People in the Age of AI.” In the book, the author wrote that: today we produce more content than in any era, but the feeling of “one real person talking to another real person” is disappearing. He said the current writing is “perfect in grammar but emotionally hollow, fluent but without a soul.”

This book itself was detected by Originality.ai as likely AI-generated.

If, in the past, self-help books still contained the unique experience of successful people to some extent, today self-help can be produced by AI assembly lines—an assembly line so anyone can get on, publish a book, and chat with you for a couple of lines.

No one reads the books, but the business works

Actually, readers aren’t fools. People can still tell which content is written by AI.

According to the same report, AI-generated books average only 26 reviews, while books written by humans average 129—nearly a 5x difference. Even if you remove the dozen or so classic reprints with the highest review counts, human authors still have more than double the reviews of AI authors.

More reviews usually means someone truly read it and, after finishing, was willing to come back and say a few words. Fewer reviews means the book is likely bought, flipped through a few pages, and thrown away—or no one buys it at all.

Readers’ noses are very sharp, but Amazon’s shelves don’t help filter.

Amazon’s self-publishing platform Kindle Direct Publishing requires authors to disclose AI-generated content, but “AI-assisted” content doesn’t need to be disclosed. That means if you have AI write a whole book and then you edit two sentences yourself, you can call it “assisted” and don’t have to tell anyone. The platform also sets a limit of up to 3 books per person per day; with 365 days in a year, 3 books a day is over a thousand books.

Amazon has no incentive to clean these books up. Every listing contributes traffic and takes a cut in platform fees. If a book doesn’t sell, it doesn’t occupy warehouse space—after all, it’s print-on-demand. To the platform, these books all look identical on the shelf.

The most ironic part is that these AI authors might be the only people who are truly “successful” in the entire self-help success category.

The stuff that self-help books teach—finding blue-ocean niches, low-cost trial and error, mass production, building passive income—both of the high-output AI authors mentioned earlier basically did it all. Their 74 books cover every anxious keyword that has search demand, production costs are close to zero, and readers don’t really need to learn anything from the book. They only need to click buy when they’re anxious in the middle of the night.

The content in the book is likely garbage, but the act of selling the books itself perfectly executes everything the books teach.

Friends in China should find this logic familiar. During the earlier wave of knowledge monetization, people like Li Yizhou at least still had to appear on camera to record courses, and cultivate their persona—if you were faking it, you still had to “look like a mentor.”

Now even that step is skipped. AI writes, Amazon sells, and the author themselves doesn’t even need to understand what’s written in their own book.

The self-help category has a special feature: it may be the least sensitive to content quality of any publishing genre in the world.

No one buys self-help books to learn some specific skill. People buy them because on some evening they feel their life needs to change, and buying a $11.99 book is the action with the lowest friction right now. Once you buy it, you’ve already completed the sense of ritual around “making a change”—whether you actually read it is a separate matter.

AI hasn’t changed the essence of self-help; it’s only driven the cost of producing that ritual sense down to zero.

Back when knowledge monetization was hottest in China a couple of years ago, there was a saying in the industry: the shovel-sellers make more money than the gold-diggers. Now you don’t even need to sell shovels. AI builds the shovels and the mine together—you just have to put it on the shelf.

In the end, Originality.ai’s report raises a question: since AI can generate this content for free, why are there still people willing to pay for a book? The answer may be simple: the “book” format itself comes with an aura of authority and a sense of ritual—even if the contents can also be obtained from ChatGPT.

Anxiety-driven consumption has never cared whether the thing you bought is useful. The moment you buy it is the painkiller.