AI books sell badly one by one. Together they cut human authors' income in seven genres out of eight.
Researchers classified the full text of 14,419 randomly selected self-published e-books released between January 2023 and March 2026, using the Pangram detector, whose developers report a false-positive rate of 0.04%. Books with substantial AI content make up 20% of that catalogue but only 12.1% of sales and 11.3% of revenue — they perform poorly on their own terms. The market still shifted underneath them: between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2026 the catalogue grew 38.3-fold, the number of titles selling each quarter grew 19.2-fold, but quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold. Looking only at books with no detected AI text, revenue fell in seven of eight genres even as their average price rose, and AI-heavy titles took a growing share of the scarce top-ranking positions. The effect is strongest in genres with high AI adoption and Kindle Unlimited availability.
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