Anyone who has ever written a book—be it on tennis, on other sports, or in fact on any subject—will know how difficult it is to make it a success. Unless you happen to have invented Harry Potter, it is incredibly hard to produce a bestseller. For the vast majority of authors, writing books is not a path to riches. And it is becoming even more difficult, thanks to AI. 

Three years ago, I was lucky enough to have a book published. The Roger Federer Effect, cowritten with my friend and colleague Simon Graf, came out in October 2022. Timed somewhat fortuitously with Federer’s retirement, it was well received, with the German version selling well in Switzerland. 

In the days and weeks after publication, I became somewhat addicted to checking the Amazon bestselling lists, a habit that has proved hard to shake off, even now. But those Amazon lists also serve a purpose: They’re the easiest way to get at least an idea about how your book is doing. 

Type “Roger Federer biography” into a search on Amazon, and you’ll find a host of books about the 20-time Grand Slam winner. These include books by well-known writers like Rene Stauffer, Christopher Clarey, Chris Bowers, and even our own. However, there are also a number of books—ahead of ours in the list—all self-published, all with similarly laid-out covers, all slightly artificial-looking. 

Wanting to know a little more, I clicked on one: Roger Federer biography: Mastering the Court: The Unstoppable Rise and Enduring Legacy of a Tennis Icon, by “Graham Newberry.” Not recognizing the author was a red flag in itself—the tennis world is a small one—while its cover was slightly disturbing, picturing someone resembling Federer, but wearing Asics shoes instead of Nike or On, and some random, rogue letters—“RIIS”—in the title on the cover. On further inspection, things became clearer. Newberry is a prolific “writer,” with several titles to his name. Impressive, right? Well, no. A closer look reveals that many of these books—covering the likes of Jack Nicklaus, Wayne Gretzky, and Lionel Messi—were published within days of one another. He even managed to write four biographies of former U.S. presidents on successive days. 

Newberry is far from alone. Check out “Juan T. Parker,” “Sydney J. Prince,” and “George Clinton,” among many, many others. Clinton has written biographies of Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic, Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff, Alexander Zverev, Elena Rybakina, Emma Raducanu, Naomi Osaka, Nick Kyrgios, Casper Ruud, Taylor Fritz, Frances Tiafoe, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, Madison Keys, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Belinda Bencic, and Olga Danilovic. None of these authors have a digital footprint outside of Amazon, and almost none of them have any reviews.

Some of these clearly AI-generated books are comical. Chapter 1 of Newberry’s Federer book is all about…Serena Williams. Ahem. Some are even laugh-out-loud, like the books by Charles B. Prints (or Charles A. Prints), which reimagine Petra Kvitova and Ons Jabeur—and Jake [sic] Draper—as famous table tennis stars, but use all their tennis and life backstories to do so.

Some books are downright weird, like Harrison F. Cole’s biography of Carlos Alcaraz, the cover of which is definitely not a photo of Alcaraz; it’s no tennis player I’ve ever seen and looks vaguely like an actor or a singer in a boy band, wearing a collared, sleeveless top. His biography of Jannik Sinner carries a cover photo that does not even try to make it look like the Italian, instead showing a woman.

Many of these books pop up in the days after a big event. When Coco Gauff won the French Open in June, a number of suspicious titles appeared. Sabrina M. Ellsworth managed to publish an Aryna Sabalenka biography in September, two days after she penned one on Jasmine Paolini.

AI has made all this possible, allowing factories (or individuals) to produce books en masse. Writing in the New Yorker in October, Stephen Witt reported that there are thought to be almost 4 hundred trillion words on the indexed internet,” but many of them are useless—high quality text is rare, and the supply is finite. “Since A.I. chatbots are recycling existing work, they rely on cliché, and their phrasing grows stale quickly. It’s difficult to get fresh, high quality writing out of theme—I have tried,” Witt wrote.  

But perhaps a bigger problem than lousy prose is the lack of regulation. Amazon is more than happy to allow these books to flood the market, pushing legitimate titles down its search engine. Some of these books are even sponsored.