ZeroState Press
Est. 2026
An independent press
Producer-Directed
AI-Collaborative Fiction
Transparent by Design

A new kind of publishing house.

ZeroState publishes literary and genre fiction developed through human editorial direction and AI prose generation.

Scroll · The Mandate
§ 01

A press that does not pretend.

ZeroState Press publishes literary and genre fiction developed through human editorial direction and artificial-intelligence prose generation.

Every book is shaped — structure, theme, voice, line — by a human producer working across multiple drafts. AI is the drafting medium. The producer is the author of the work.

We disclose this on every title. We treat the disclosure as definitional, not regulatory. The pretense that machines write alone, or that humans can pretend machines weren't involved, both diminish what is actually happening in the work.

ZeroState exists to do this honestly. We publish slowly. We edit deeply. We stand behind every book on our list.

§ 02

How a ZeroState book gets made.

i.

The Master Brief

Every book begins as a master brief: premise, characters, arc, themes, voice samples. The producer writes the foundation by hand. Nothing is generated until the architecture is settled.

ii.

The Outline

Chapter by chapter, the producer breaks the book into beats: what happens, what it accomplishes, what the texture should feel like. The outline is detailed enough that the prose has somewhere to land.

iii.

The Drafts

AI generates prose to the outline. The producer reads, rejects, marks up, requests revision. Multiple passes. Voice gets anchored to samples. Drafts that aren't working get cut entirely.

iv.

The Edit

The producer takes the manuscript line by line. Passages are rewritten. Voice is harmonized. What stays has been read, marked, and chosen. The book is finished when it sounds like itself.

v.

The Disclosure

Every title is published with the Amazon KDP AI-generated content disclosure attached and reproduced on the copyright page. The disclosure is part of the book, not an afterthought.

§ 03

Pen names, openly named as such.

Each ZeroState pen name is an editorial identity — a name attached to a body of work with a distinct aesthetic and a distinct concern. They are not fabricated humans. They are the names under which a particular line of books is published.

№ 01 Literary Fiction
Landscape · Endurance
Established 2026
Adrian Croix

Books published under the Adrian Croix name concern landscape, endurance, and the places where people and animals meet. The line favors restraint, observation, and the small motions of attention. Croix is a literary pen name for ZeroState Press, developed under the editorial direction of the house.

The Standing · 2026 · Available now
№ 02 Romance · Thriller
Suspense and the Heart
Established 2026
Cassia Vale

Books published under the Cassia Vale name move between romance and thriller — stories of attachment under pressure, of what people risk and what they refuse to. The line favors momentum, atmosphere, and the slow turn of a decision that cannot be taken back.

Uncertain Ground · 2026 The Strait · 2026
№ 03 Horror · Domestic Dread
Small Towns, Long Shadows
Established 2026
Silan Moor

Books published under the Silan Moor name work in the long territory of horror — the dread that gathers in ordinary places, the slow accumulation of wrongness, the thing seen at the edge of vision and then not seen again. The line is interested in atmosphere over event, in inheritance and silence, in what a house knows and what a town has agreed not to say. Horror as the form that takes the everyday seriously enough to be afraid of it.

Aldermere — The Yard · 2026
§ 04

Current and forthcoming titles.

オールダーメア ザ・ヤード by シラン・ムーア. Japanese edition. Cover shows an isolated wooden farmhouse at dusk with title rendered in distressed Japanese characters, published by ゼロステート・プレス.
Available · June 2026 · 日本語版
オールダーメア — ザ・ヤード
シラン・ムーア 著

日本語版 — the Japanese edition of Aldermere — The Yard, prepared in the register of contemporary J-horror prose rather than literal translation. Where the American edition reaches for the long shadow and the inherited silence, the Japanese edition reaches for 怪談 — for stillness, for the half-glimpsed, for the place that remembers. Same novel, different floor it walks across.

Amazon.co.jp で発売中
Aldermere — The Yard by Silan Moor. English edition. Cover shows an isolated wooden farmhouse at dusk with warm light in its windows, set in a dark overgrown yard beneath a heavy clouded sky.
Available · June 2026
Aldermere — The Yard
A novel by Silan Moor

A small town at the edge of an older forest. A house at the end of a road that no one quite remembers building. And in the yard behind it, something the family has agreed, without ever saying so, never to discuss. The debut Silan Moor novel — domestic horror in the long American tradition.

Available on Amazon
The Standing — a novel by Adrian Croix. Cover shows the eye of a dark horse above a silhouetted figure leading a horse through a desert wadi at sunset.
Available · May 2026
The Standing
A novel by Adrian Croix

A horse found alone in the wadi. Three days without water. A damaged leg. The desert teaches an endurance that is not the endurance of strength but of stillness.

Available on Amazon
Uncertain Ground by Cassia Vale. Cover shows a figure standing in the broken frame of a ruined wall, looking out over a vast city at sunset.
Available · April 2026
Uncertain Ground
A novel by Cassia Vale

Against the architecture of a city in slow ruin. A woman returning to what she once chose to leave. The question of what remains when everything else has shifted.

Available on Amazon
The Strait by Cassia Vale. Cover shows a narrow waterway between two coastlines at sunset, with faint blueprint-style overlays across the sky.
Available · March 2026
The Strait
A novel by Cassia Vale

A novel of contemporary American strategy. The deal made across a narrow water, and the war it was meant to end. A reckoning with what nations are willing to trade for what they call survival.

Available on Amazon
§ 05

The human at the center of every book.

Rocco Dallas
Founding Producer · Editorial Director

Every book published under the ZeroState imprint is developed under a named human producer who makes the structural, thematic, and line-level decisions across the life of the project. The pen names are editorial identities. The producer is the person responsible.

The producer writes the master briefs, drafts the outlines, directs the AI through revision, rewrites passages that aren't landing, and signs off the final manuscript line by line. The work is collaborative with the tool, but it is not anonymous and it is not unsupervised.

When a reader buys a ZeroState book, they are buying the producer's judgment, attention, and care. The disclosure on the copyright page tells them what the tool was. This page tells them who the person is.

§ 06

Books, screenplays, moving image.

Adaptation development

Every ZeroState novel is conceived from the start as a story that could move across formats. We develop properties — not isolated books — and we treat the screen as one possible destination among several.

Adaptation rights to all ZeroState titles are held by the press and available for option. Inquiries from producers, agents, and acquisition executives are welcomed and answered.

§ 07

A press finding its writers.

ZeroState is closed to outside submissions through 2026 while the founding catalog is established. We plan to open to producer-directed AI-collaborative manuscripts from external contributors in 2027, with a contract structure built specifically for the work this press publishes. To be notified when submissions open, write to us directly.

Press · Rights · Adaptation · rights@zerostatepress.com