J. Craig Wheeler

I've been tending to the mechanics of book marketing and publicity.

 

Prometheus has a marketing reserve of 150 books. We've sent out 63 so far. I have a list of individuals and companies whom I mention in the book and for whom I need to collect addresses. I made a list of companies mentioned in "Path" and used ChatGPT to provide tentative addresses. I need to refine that and identify individuals in each one who might read and propagate the book. Geeze, I sound like a salesman, not a writer.

 

I had done the Artificiality podcast with Dave and Helen Edwards on November 19. Dave posted the link on January 19.

 

I did the AI, Government, and the Future podcast with Max Romanik on Jan 22. They had provided a set of questions that were a variation on the theme but presented some challenges. I spent some time drafting answers to the questions and torquing the answers to raise some issues that they did not. I anticipated that Max would work his way through the questions as presented to me and he did that for the first couple, but then he skipped the order and combined some questions phrased in another way. That threw me a little at first, but I quickly decided substantially to abandon my prepared answers and just listen to his queries and respond as best I could. A central theme was what, exactly, do we do to keep control of AI. I kept coming back to "its complicated, but…" more than I would have liked, but I think I was cogent. 

 

This podcast was done on Riverside that only runs on Chrome. I could not use the Zoom trick of shrinking the video box and sliding it up near my camera. I played with Riverside beforehand and found I could simply shrink the whole Chrome window and move it up to the top of my screen near the camera so I would, I hope, look as if I were looking at the camera. In action, however, I left my notes open on my desktop and referred to them. That probably drew my gaze aside. We'll see what the YouTube version looks like. I remembered to center my mic and to take my glasses off. They should post the links in about a week,

 

I've arranged a three-fer for early February: a podcast on February 5 with Brandon Zemp of BlockHash, on February 6 with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind, and with Dan Turchin of AI and the Future of Work on February 7.

 

I asked ChatGPT to "Give me a list of popular podcasts that focus on technological developments and their impact on society." I got 21 and added three more from my original book proposal. Chloé Hummel, my marketing contact, tried to contact them and found most were inactive or serving small audiences. I'll try to refine my ChatGPT prompt. Prometheus has an Instagram account. We'll try to turn up some influencers there. I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.

 

I made some arrangements to attend the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, do a book signing at a Barnes and Nobel in Fairfax, VA, and visit my son and his family there. Various personal things led me to call all that off.

 

When teaching my Future of Humanity course, I asked students to bring examples of advances in technology to class as part of our program to "Be Aware" that I still want to advocate and promote. I began to experiment with getting ChatGPT and Claude to compose Tech Advance posts to X and LinkedIn with hashtags. I had to play a little with the prompt and edit a tiny bit but got an X post at 280 characters with my Authors Guild url and some nice hashtags. I found Claude to be a bit flowery and have in practice mostly used the results from ChatGPT.

 

I spent some time moving notes I had made over the last 6 months to my Authors Guild site. I'm now converting those tidbits to posts on X and LinkedIn. I have it somewhat automated now. I had about a hundred items to go to catch up with my notes and have been doing one a day for the last month or so. I may drop X and/or use Bluesky.

 

I thought briefly about Tik Tok and got an account but then all hell broke loose. I'll hold off on that. Probably too much work, anyway.

 

I gave an inscribed copy of "Path" to my friend and colleague John Scalo who has influenced my thinking on so many things in so many ways over the years. I also gave an inscribed book to Kay Firth-Butterfield, an AI and technology expert whom I met through the Good Systems group on campus. We talked about getting together, but she is writing her own book with a deadline of the end of January, so I just mailed it.

 

The Provost had scheduled a reception for faculty authors on January 22, but we had a hard freeze (down to 23 F some nights) and the reception got postponed to February 5.

 

On January 23, I led a book discussion of "Path," a roughly monthly event organized by my friend and ex-student Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. We had an excellent lively discussion of machine consciousness and related issues. We had 42 people online, of whom 6 or 8 actively contributed to the discussion. Good fun. Kind things were said of the book, but I noted in the beginning that it is different to lead a discussion of your own book rather than being a fly on the wall in a discussion by others. I remarked that I wasn't terribly excited about the title chosen by my editor and found out later that was one critique among the participants. I'm sure they had other issues they were too polite to bring up. I wish they had.

 

I found a little time to work on my next major writing project, a biography of my father I informally call Eniwetok. He participated in and witnessed the first hydrogen bomb explosion. I'm about 2/3 done but discovered some old notes that give insight into his college days at Berkeley. Those have taken some time to organize and absorb.

 

 I'm scheduled to do a reading, Q&A, and book signing at our preeminent Austin independent bookstore, Book People, on January 29. I hope to see some of you there.

 

I messed up my most recently scheduled podcast with Supernatural Realm Radio on December 12. They had not originally specified a time zone, and I checked with them to make sure. Despite a clear statement in my master schedule that the session was scheduled for 6-8 pm CST, I had scattered various preliminary backup notes around the house saying 7-9 pm CST, and that got stuck in my head. I had a regular Thursday beer with a friend, one of my principal beta readers, Wayne Bowen, from 5 to 6 and was home and comfortably settled in by 6:30. As 7 rolled around, I finally realized with a shock what my error had been. I sent several frantic emails, but it was too late. As it turned out, they had only received a copy of The Path to Singularity that very day and had not had time to look at it. They were just as happy to reschedule. Still a wound to my sense of professionalism.

 

I had enjoyed my podcast interview with Don Murphy on December 7. He posted the results on December 10, but the result was a bit of a tangle. Don uses the PodMatch podcast service. In order to make the release work, he said I needed to confirm that I had done the interview on the PodMatch site. I could not figure out how to do that. After several emails with various people, it turned out that my publicist, Joanne McCall, had done the original scheduling, and she had the email on which the interview had to be confirmed. Don also said that I could establish my own account on PodMatch using his affiliate link. I tried that, but again got lost in some technical PodMatch space. I finally gave up.

 

I wanted to send copies of The Path to Singularity to my colleagues who had been kind enough to write jacket blurbs. Prometheus did not provide that service, and I wanted to sign and personalize them anyway. There is a USPS mode of "media mail" that is pretty reasonable for domestic mail, a little over 5 bucks, but it is a tad pricey to send books to Great Britain and Australia. Worth the price.

 

I've found there is substantial turnover in the book business. The original person in charge of production at Prometheus, Brianna Soubannarath, moved on in December and left some questions hanging, the structure of a royalty statement and how the Audible version of the book came to be. Jake Bonar is my new production person, and he answered those questions. Those rights were sold separately, and the company that bought them produced the audio version. Amazon then buys from them. I had no role in any of that.

 

After the flurry of November/December podcasts, I've turned my attention to other modes of distribution. I'll try to get some books stocked at the Visitors Center at McDonald Observatory. I have convinced both the University of Texas Library and the Austin City Library to stock some version.

 

An odd opportunity turned up. I got an email from a young woman who is a science writer for Popular Mechanics magazine. She said she was interested in doing a review of a preprint a colleague and I had posted last April about the correlation of Dark Matter and spontaneous human combustion. She belatedly realized the paper was a total spoof posted on the astrophysics preprint archive as an April Fools joke. She caught her own mistake before I could correct her, but I emailed her and tried to let her down gently. I mentioned The Path to Singularity as perhaps being of interest to Popular Mechanics readers, and she said she might consider that.

 

After my last post, I have had a very interesting exchange with nephew-in-law Alejandro who runs his own small import business in San Diego. Alejandro has seriously adopted ChatGPT and other large language model AIs in his business and personal use. He swears by their time-saving utility. I wanted to send some copies of The Path to Singularity to people in Congress with a technological bent and decided to try to use ChatGPT. I asked two version of ChatGPT, one on my mobile phone, one online, and online Claude from Anthropic for a list of congress people with an interest in technology and their office addresses. In a few seconds each, I got three slightly different, but overlapping lists. ChatGPT warned me to check office addresses because congress people change offices frequently. It was easy enough to check offices with a regular browser (although that took me about 20 minutes) but combing through a browser to figure out which of 435 representatives and 100 senators had technology interests would have taken me hours. I'm sold, but there is still a learning curve. I generated a collated list of candidates from the three lists. I probably should have asked ChatGPT to do that, but I did it by hand, and it took me a half hour. Prometheus is happy to send books to the 25 people who made the list.

 

I'll attend the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society near Washington DC January 13 – 16 and then stay with son Diek and family in Fairfax for a few days. I contacted several bookstores in the DC area with no response from most, but I'll do a book signing at the Barnes and Nobel in Fairfax, VA, on Sunday, January 19. I'm also scheduled to do a book signing at our preeminent Austin independent bookstore, Book People, on January 29.

 

I've had some tentative discussions with Neil deGrasse Tyson about appearing on his StarTalk podcast in NYC. Prometheus is keen on the idea. Neil asked whether Prometheus is prepared to do a second printing to accommodate a "Tyson hit." StarTalk is watched by several hundred thousand to a million people. Serious business! Several people involved in the game have suggested that I try to appear on Joe Rogan since he is right here in Austin. I don't weigh my odds highly, but I'm thinking about it. Book People did not want me to do another signing in the greater Austin area, but Neil says there is no such restriction in podcast space.

 

This was typed from my brain, with a little AI help from Grammerly.

 

Talk to you again in 2025!