J. Craig Wheeler

What happened to the book proposal mentioned in that post of April 25? Ah, well you might ask. Despite the aid of the Author's Questionnaire and a fair amount of work, my agent, in her quest to make the strongest case we could, kept thinking of new additions and refinements. We need a punchy Sales Handle to lead off. A couple of sentences that will make an acquisition editor hunger for more. Refined sales points. Can you get Neil deGrasse Tyson to accede to having his name used as at least considering to write an introduction? You say it is important that you have the broad perspective of space and time of an astronomer? Justify that in pungent prose. Say something about the James Webb Space Telescope, a hot new topic that is in the public's eye. Iterate on the title and explain your choice. Name some "comparable books," not necessarily on the same topic, but related best sellars to imply that my book is too, if only given the chance. Expand the list of competitive books, sort them into old and newer, explain how your book is different. Compile a list of of potential blurbers. Among a dozen others, I listed Elon Musk, an Austin businessman, and Jeff Bezos, a Texas businessman. If anyone has contact info, please let me know. List all 107 companies you mention by name in the book in case some might want to buy copies. Do you have as many Twitter followers as Beyonce (answer: no)? Write an annotated table of contents giving a synopsis of each of the 15 chapters. Re-write all that; you sound like a college professor! This is a sales pitch. Title all the subsections in each chapter and hence in the sample chapters.

This may sound like I'm complaining, but the fact is while the work was taxing, it was also stimulating. My agent made me dig deep into what I was writing and why. In any case, it took several months of intense work that then slacked off in midsummer and continued until today. In the meantime, I found bits and pieces to add to the book, another 8000 words. The draft is now 128,240 words.

My agent debated whether to submit the proposal over the summer or wait until after Labor Day when people were back at work. She finally elected the latter. When things slacked off on Brains, Genes, and the Cosmos, I worked on the biography of my father, tentatively entitled Eniwetok. There is a connection. I mean this to be not just the story of one man, but a reflection on the technology that developed over his lifetime. He worked on inertial navigation and ICBMs, a solar eclipse, the first hydrogen bomb, a proposed atomic airplane that could fly forever (at 200 mph 200 feet above the ground; it was destined to be heavy and slow. JFK cancelled it), weather satellites, and finally on the Apollo Program.

We are now in what I hope are the final iterations on the proposal. Double spaced with now four sample chapters, it comes to 41,000 words and 147 pages. There is some chance it will go off to publishers next week.

I have just sent off to my agent a draft of a book proposal for my book tentatively entitled Brains, Genes, and the Universe: the Technological Future of Humanity. The notion is that she will use that to approach publishers, trigger a bidding war, and the book will end up a New York Times bestseller. I'm not holding my breath.

It has taken quite a while to get here. I finished a draft of the book, 120,000 words, last November after two Covid years of regular effort. My agent then had me prepare an Author Questionnaire with all sorts of information about me, the book, and how we might sell it. That took me a couple of months of steady work, an hour or so a day, with iterations with my agent. That then led to filling out a template for the formal book proposal, making judicious use of the material from the Author Questionnaire. One portion of the proposal calls for an annotated Table of Contents that was forbidden from using any actual text from the book. I confess, I cheated and pulled some text from the book in my first pass through summarizing 15 chapters, but then I went back and edited to remove any self-plagiarizing. I'm not sure what the point is, but rules is rules.

The proposal also called for three sample chapters. I have to pick only three chapters from 15, each my precious baby? I picked the introductory chapter and two on brains, one on artificial brains, and one on the real thing.

I'm sure there will be more iteration with my agent, but we are getting closer to making the pitch and maybe getting out of the extensive spec work phase.

I wrote The Krone Experiment long ago, its sequel, Krone Ascending, more recently. I still have aspirations to write at least a third book in the series. My son, Rob, is a film maven. He and I wrote a screenplay of The Krone Experiment, and Rob made it into a micro-budget full-length film here in Austin. It did not open the doors we had hoped at the time although we both tried flogging it in various ways. We remain convinced that it would make an exciting film if done with a proper budget and special effects. While the project lay fallow for many years, the development of streaming represents a new market and new domain for material. The Queen's Gambit was a successful streamed film based on a decades-old novel. "Why not us?" I thought.

I stumbled on a connection to the agent who represented the estate of Walter Tevis, the author of the original novel, The Queen's Gambit. We seemed to have a constructive Email conversation until she asked for our specific aspirations for what we would want from a production company; payment for the rights to the novel and screenplay, and perhaps an opportunity to write a treatment for a series. She dropped us like a rock and suggested we talk to one of the big artist agencies in LA. I still do not know what happened.

I poked around on the Web and came up with some possibilities for LA film agents while being basically leery of the prospects of a cold call. I drafted a pitch letter and was on the verge of sending it to one agency when Rob thought about it and suggested we be cautious. We have a substantial intellectual property (IP); books, screenplay, film. Are we sure we have the rights in place? What about the Japanese translation?

That led me to contact a local attorney, the spouse of an astronomy colleague, who has connections to the local music industry. I had tried to talk to her a decade ago, but she had felt our film project was too far from her expertise at the time. Since then, it turns out, she has had considerable experience with TV and streaming. To our pleasant surprise, she agreed to meet us last Friday at a pleasant hole-in-the-wall bistro for a pancake and coffee breakfast to talk, pro bono. She completely agreed with Rob. We really need to get our ducks in line before approaching an agent. Make sure the rights to the books (hardbacks, paperbacks, Ebooks, foreign rights), the screenplay (which was optioned twice), and the film (actors were unpaid, but promised a share of future profit) are secure. Do formal copyrights with the Library of Congress. Maybe form a limited liability corporation to hold all the IP rights. Establish and activate a fan base. Many people have read the books and seen the film, but how to draw on that? Update The Krone Experiment website (www.thekroneexperiment.com). Hire a generalist attorney, maybe a literary lawyer in Austin, to handle the IP. Beware publicists, there are a lot of bad ones out there.  

That's a heavy lift. We'll take a deep breath and have at it.