I recently received a tip about an author known as Sindo Hane who has been enormously productive this spring, publishing more than 100 novels at Amazon, all available to read through Kindle Unlimited. (The easiest way to quickly scan all of Hane’s work is through this Goodreads page.)
Sindo Hane is most certainly a pen name for either an individual or a group of people who are populating Amazon with low-quality, AI-generated genre fiction. At first, most of the novels were clocking in at 70–80 pages; more recently published novels are about double the length. Some are labeled as “illustrated,” but that stretches the definition of the term. All are torturous to read. The covers and titles are formulaic and clearly trope- and keyword-driven, e.g., The Shroud of Blackwood Manor, Murder in Lavender Time, The Chronos Deception, and so on.
The books are getting scant attention from anyone, but if enrolled in KU, I guess there’s potential for a few pennies earned per book, and if one has thousands of titles available (Sindo Hane is well on their way to doing just that), then maybe it becomes worth it? This content-farming model has been around for a long time, only now it’s AI powered. Sindo Hane has no online presence aside from an X account, @sindohanemys.
I am very curious to see if and when Amazon draws any kind of line for such activity.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
For the heck of it, I bought (for free) When the Village Clock Lied, by Sindo Hane. I then ran the prologue through 3 AI detectors (Pangram, GPTZero and ZeroGPT). The results:
I don’t trust these detectors when their scores are +/- 70%, but three different findings near 100% is uncontestable.
There’s no point in raising this with customer service… and everyone else working for Amazon is anonymous. I suppose I can try PR.