What People Actually Write With AI: Genre Data From 738 Books

Published: July 2026 · 5 min read · First-party data

Everyone speculates about what authors do with AI writing tools. We have actual numbers. We looked at 738 books created on ShakespeareAI and broke them down by genre. The short version: it's overwhelmingly fiction, and fantasy is running away with it.

The full genre breakdown

Here are the top genres across the 738 books, by the genre each author selected when they started writing:

Fantasy is eating the category

Nearly a third of every AI-written book on the platform is fantasy. That tracks with what's happening in reader-land too — fantasy and its cousins (romantasy, epic fantasy, LitRPG) are among the fastest-growing areas on Kindle. When writers reach for an AI tool, world-building-heavy fiction is where they point it first, likely because generating a coherent magic system, map of factions, and large cast is exactly the kind of scaffolding work AI accelerates.

It's a fiction story, not a non-fiction one

About four out of five books are fiction. That runs counter to a common assumption that AI writing is mostly used for quick non-fiction — how-to guides, lead magnets, and the like. Non-fiction is real (education and self-help together make up close to 10%), but fiction authors are the dominant users. The blank-page problem is worst in fiction, and that's where an AI first draft removes the most friction.

What this means if you're choosing what to write

Popularity among writers is not the same as opportunity. Fantasy is what most people write with AI, which also means it's crowded. If you're picking a lane, weigh what's popular to produce against what readers are actually buying — the two don't always line up. (We're building Book Signal to turn live Kindle bestseller data into exactly that read on demand and competition per category.)

Wherever you land, the practical takeaway is the same: the tool matters less than finishing. Fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, or self-help — the authors who publish are the ones who get a complete draft down and then edit it into shape.