Dennis Meredith: The Happy Chip

Advance copy: Backstories on books by NASW members

Cover: Happy Chip

THE HAPPY CHIP
Dennis Meredith
Glyphus LLC, April 25, 2017, print: $16.95, ebook: $2.99
ISBN-10: 1939118220; ISBN-13: 978-1939118226
Ebook: 9781939118202

Meredith reports:

The idea for The Happy Chip sneaked up on me. I realized that companies were becoming ever more sophisticated — and intrusive — at monitoring my every decision, my every whim. Google knew my web searches; Amazon knew my shopping interests; Facebook knew who my friends were.

So, I wondered, what if a company, NeoHappy, Inc., took such data-grabbing to an extreme? What if it created a nanochip that people could have implanted in their body that would tell them — by measuring their hormones and physiological responses — exactly how much they were enjoying a particular product, experience, or person?

The Happy Chip would guide them to the best products, the best life choices, even the best significant others. And the chip would feed that data to a Happy Ratings database — a sort of super-Yelp — that would offer subscribers ratings of every product and service.

Dennis Meredith

From that initial idea, The Happy Chip evolved into a high-tech thriller, in which a nefarious company executive and his engineer henchman develop a chip that not only monitors people, but controls them. The new chips can produce absolute elation, but also suicidal depression, uncontrollable lust, murderous rage, and remote-controlled death.

Battling the rogue executive is the intrepid science-writer hero (an NASW member, of course!), his indomitable wife, and a slightly disreputable Russian white-hat hacker and his gang. Their quest takes them from Boston to Beijing, as they try to stop the villains and the Chinese government from developing and spreading the chip technology to subjugate whole populations. How does it end? I’ll just say that the climax is a grabber!

We’re self-publishing and marketing our novels — so far a labor of love, not money. The typical road to critical and financial success in the crowded fiction publishing market is to keep producing good books, promote like crazy, and build a fan base. The process can take many years and many books, and is basically a crap shoot. Fortunately, my wife Joni has become a social-media-marketing maven — joining Goodreads book clubs, compiling blog contacts, soliciting reviews, and tweeting as @scifinov.

Contact info:

Dennis Meredith, 760-451-6845, dennis@glyphus.com
Meredith’s website: http://www.DennisMeredith.com
Twitter: @ExplainResearch
Book website: http://www.thehappychip.com
Publicity: editor@glyphus.com
Meredith’s blog: http://www.ResearchExplainer.com

NASW members: will your book be published soon? Take advantage of this opportunity for shameless self-promotion. Submit your report for Advance Copy.

Tell your fellow NASW members how you came up with the idea for your book, developed a proposal, found an agent and publisher, funded and conducted research, and put the book together. Include what you wish you had known before you began working on your book, or had done differently.

See https://www.nasw.org/advance-copy-submission-guidelines.

Thinking of writing a book? If you are a NASW member, you may access a list of more than 150 books and online resources to help you craft your book proposal, find an agent and funding sources, negotiate your contract, learn about self-publishing, publicize and market your book, and more at https://www.nasw.org/article/write-book.

Send book info and questions about book publishing to Lynne Lamberg, NASW book editor, llamberg@nasw.org.

Advance Copy

The path from idea to book may take myriad routes. The Advance Copy column, started in 2000 by NASW volunteer book editor Lynne Lamberg, features NASW authors telling the stories behind their books. Authors are asked to report how they got their idea, honed it into a proposal, found an agent and a publisher, funded and conducted their research, and organized their writing process. They also are asked to share what they wish they’d known when they started or would do differently next time, and what advice they can offer aspiring authors. Lamberg edits the authors’ answers to produce the Advance Copy reports.

NASW members: Will your book be published soon? Visit www.nasw.org/advance-copy-submission-guidelines for information on submitting your report.

Publication of NASW author reports in Advance Copy does not constitute NASW's endorsement of any publication or the ideas, values, or material contained within or espoused by authors or their books. We hope this column stimulates productive discussions on important topics now and in the future as both science and societies progress. We welcome your discussion in the comments section below.