The byline
Jory Hark is a pen name.
The person behind it writes for film and television, and would rather these books were read without that standing in front of them.
What the day job left behind is the shape. Dinoroost is built the way a season is built: ten episodes, one spotlight character each, a cold open in front and a tag behind, a midpoint that takes something away and never gives it back, and a clock running under all ten that nobody in the story can stop. The chapters are assigned their lengths before they are written, the way scenes are, because a scene that runs long is not a longer scene, it is a worse one.
It is also why none of these waits for the next book to be worth reading. A season is made of episodes, and an episode that only pays off in the finale is a bad episode. Each of the ten closes its own problem, in about two hours, and then hands the village to the next one slightly worse off than it found it.
The rest of what there is to say is in the books, which is where the studio would like to leave it.
Jory Hark is the byline on all ten volumes and on everything this imprint publishes. It is not a credit for the illustrations, and it is not a narrator. How the books were made is set out plainly further down this page.
The imprint
Dinoroost publishes
one thing, properly.
Season One of The Nine Minutes: ten books, about 225,000 words, one season, an eight-kid ensemble and a clock nobody can stop.
Selling direct is what lets a press this size price a ten-book set as a ten-book set, put the ten ebooks in the box with it for nothing, sell a class of thirty on a purchase order, hand a teacher a file at the moment they are deciding, and answer a question about the book with a person rather than a form.
The tenth volume will be as available as the first for as long as anybody wants it, and no copy of these books is going to be destroyed to make room for something newer.
How these books are made
The answer, before you ask.
The text and the illustrations were produced with generative AI under human direction. That sentence is printed on the copyright page of every volume and it is here for the same reason: a school librarian deciding whether to spend a budget should not have to discover it.
What that means in practice, without dressing it up. The premise, the canon, the ten outlines, the rules the writing had to obey, the revision briefs and every editorial decision are human work, written down and dated. The prose was drafted by a model against those documents, then line-edited and continuity-checked by people. The pictures were generated from written prompt files, one entry per slot, kept as a production record. The rights reserved are in the human-authored expression and in the selection, arrangement and editing — not in everything on the page.
Two things this press will not do. It will not describe the pictures as drawn or painted by hand, because they were not. And it will not call a synthetic voice a performance, which is one of the reasons there is no audiobook.
The back matter is held to a different standard. The two nonfiction pages at the back of every volume — Field Notes and Make It — are cited to a paper or a catalogued specimen, and the citation file names the person who checked each one. Those columns are not all signed yet, and the schools page says so rather than implying otherwise.
Contact
A person answers.
Orders and books
Where is it, it arrived damaged, I ordered the wrong one, can I change the address.
Schools, libraries, purchase orders
Class sets, invoicing, W-9, teacher’s notes, citations, and anything a review needs.