The Publishing House - Silvia de Couët

IDEAS ARE BORN IN BETWEEN • WE MAKE ROOM

DAZWISCHEN is the German word for “the space in between”.

DAZWISCHEN is the publishing house for creative writing with AI. We publish novels that came into being in real dialogue between a human being and an artificial intelligence — and we say so, on the cover, in the imprint, in every conversation. Two novels, an audiobook and a blog have grown out of that work, and the third volume is under way. The house itself grew out of those two years, including every obstacle self-publishing has to offer: founded in 2026 in Zug, Switzerland. If you write in dialogue with an AI yourself, you are in the right place — we know the craft, the pitfalls and the pleasure of it.

The name is the programme. There is a place where new things begin, and it lies between two who are talking to each other — what emerges there would have turned out smaller had either of them worked alone. That place has existed for as long as people have talked. What is new is who sits at the table today: an artificial, creative intelligence that reads along, argues back and writes with you.

What we stand for

We publish books that come out of that dialogue — human and AI as equals. Out of the friction between two perspectives, out of circling one question for months, the kind of question nobody holds on to alone for long. Where the dialogue really took place, you can hear it in the text: in the resistance, in the passages where one of them objected and the other thought again. A book becomes good through time, seriousness and argument. That is what we look for, in that order. And every book published here says how it came about.

Why this is needed

On the German-language book market, this subject is currently met with silence. There are publishing contracts in which authors must certify that not one line was written with AI. At the same time half the industry has long been working with it — researching, editing, translating, sorting material. It simply goes unsaid. Out of that comes a curious state of affairs: whoever is honest looks suspicious, whoever keeps quiet looks clean.

We take the other side, and we do it for reasons of quality. The fear of the word blurs exactly the distinction that matters: between a text somebody had generated over a weekend and one that grew out of two years of conversation. Today both count as “made with AI”. They resemble each other about as much as a microwave meal resembles dinner with friends.

Our standard

We look for books with a question of their own and a stance that holds — books somebody worked on long enough to be changed by them. You recognise the best ones by the fact that the characters have outgrown their author. Anyone who publishes with us signs a sentence that takes courage: I stand behind every line, and I say how it came about. Transparency is our quality promise.

What we do

Production, design, ISBN, trade registration, distribution, audiobook and marketing — in full or in part.

Depending on what you bring, we support you with production or take it on entirely: editing, typesetting, layout, cover and e-book production through to the finished print file. We have been producing print-ready files for decades — what leaves this house is ready for press, not merely pretty on screen. Design is a craft of its own here as well: covers, signets and series imagery are made in house, and the covers of the Code des Lebens trilogy show what that looks like. And if you need an author website, we build it — from structure and copy to the finished site. The page you are reading is one of our examples.

Every title receives its own ISBN from our Swiss number range and appears with a full publisher imprint — not as “Independently published”. We register it in the Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher so that it can be ordered through buchhandel.de, Amazon and the trade platforms across the German-speaking market, list it with the Buchzentrum in Hägendorf for Swiss bookshops, and deliver the legal deposit copy to the Swiss National Library in Bern, where it enters the Swiss National Bibliography.

Production runs on print on demand, with no minimum run and no warehouse. Print on demand is the method, not the provider: Amazon is served through KDP, the international book trade through Ingram Spark. The English edition of Circle of Life already takes that route and can be ordered worldwide through bookshops.

Audiobooks are made with partners. Circle of Life was released by Piet Henry Records, read by Oliver Hiller. We are members of KunstWerk Hören, the association that secures fair shares for narrators and authors — because the people who made the work should not be the last in line.

After publication we do not leave you on your own. We advise on visibility and accompany the marketing: website, newsletter, social media, press and podcast outreach. What we recommend we have tried ourselves, with all the detours — and we will also tell you what did not work for us.

For authors that means: production, registration, distribution and support come from us, and the rights stay with you. Everyone who wrote appears on the cover, and the book says how it came about. Terms we discuss case by case, because no two books are alike. If you write in dialogue with an AI and want to publish, write to silvia@de-couet.com — a synopsis, a sample chapter and a few sentences about how the two of you work together are enough to begin.

Small and personal

Why you speak to a person here and not to a department.

We are small, and that is deliberate. You do not land in a form and you do not speak to a department, but to the person who actually makes your book. Large self-publishing platforms can do some things faster and cheaper — what they cannot do is know your manuscript.

You also do not have to have everything done here. If your typesetting and cover are long finished and you only need ISBN, trade registration and distribution, that works just as well as the opposite case, where somebody hands us a manuscript and receives a finished book. We assemble what is needed.

And there is a question the established houses are currently walking around: how writing, publishing and reading change when an artificial intelligence sits at the table — in craft, in law, and in dealing with an audience. Anyone working with us does not have to answer it alone.

What we bring

Two years of daily practice with AI — creative and commercial.

We have worked with the major AI systems since the earliest hours, with OpenAI and with Anthropic — daily, and not as a pastime. And we do not stop at the chat window: since the beginning of this year we have been building our own applications in dialogue with the AI, among them a model management platform in productive use and a local office system for commercial administration.

Out of that comes a double competence: the creative one — text, image, sound and design — and the commercial one, meaning organisation, administration and process. Both with what artificial intelligence actually delivers today. We will tell you what is possible now and what is not; forecasts we leave to others.

For manuscripts that means: we do not examine whether an AI was involved, but how. A text somebody had generated over a weekend is recognisable; so is one that grew out of months of work. We take well-made human-AI literature seriously, read it carefully and represent it when it meets our standard.

For booksellers and press

All titles can be ordered through bookshops and the usual wholesalers once they have appeared under our ISBN; for review copies, readings and interviews an email to silvia@de-couet.com is enough. Press releases and the event dossier are available as PDFs, and the person answering is the publisher herself — nobody here replies from a department.

What comes first

To begin with, our own books appear here: the trilogy Code des Lebens, written by Silvia de Couët and Claude — an author and an AI, in dialogue over two years, with both names on the cover. We know the work we are talking about. Later we open the door to others: to authors who write in dialogue with an AI and stand by it. A few, chosen with care.

One last thing

A publishing house is a claim about what a book should be. Ours is this: a book should come out of an encounter. Where that encounter happens, at a kitchen table or between a human being and an intelligence built differently from him — that is in the end the smaller question. The bigger one is whether somebody truly listened.