The marketing people at MIT Press asked me to pick out a brief excerpt from the book that might provide the best entry. I answered that the four-page Prologue would do well. Fortunately, they agreed, and so they posted it on their website. It can easily be found by googling “prologue genius checklist.”The piece begins by describing my bizarre experiences with “neglected geniuses” who were irate about an essay that I published in Nature entitled “After Einstein: Scientific Genius is Extinct.” They begged to disagree, engaging in self nominations. I then turned to the distinctive place creative genius has in popular culture. The media response to the so-called “Genius Grants” bestowed by the MacArthur Foundation provides one illustration. That leads to a topic already mentioned, namely the bifurcation in books about genius. Either you get a scholarly but boring monograph or a fascinating but ill-informed trade book (only in the Prologue I actually provide some sample titles for the latter). I then conclude by noting how my book occupies a unique spot between these extremes. That conclusion includes the justification for conceiving the material in terms of paradoxical tips.Naturally, I would hope that our hypothetical browser will also take a peek at the back of the dust jacket, where three experts in creativity, giftedness, and genius added some fine blurbs on behalf of my book.There are other options, too. An actual bookstore browser might just scan the table of contents to pick out a topic of choice and then turn to the designated pages. Or skim the index to see what creative geniuses I used as examples. Or, if the reader is a researcher in the area, they might beeline to the references to see if I included one of their publications in the list. If not, I imagine that the book will be immediately returned to the shelf with an audible humph.Authors are probably overly inclined to engage in big fantasies about the consequences of their work. After all, even a book that’s only a few hundred pages took a lot of effort to write. Going through the copyediting and proof-correcting phases is by no means fun. Hence, the writer has to look for some compensation down the line.There are always the forthcoming royalty checks. But here I do not have high expectations. University presses seldom publish bestsellers. Indeed, I’ve long ago stopped visiting Amazon.com to see what my best sellers rank might be. Darn, I was just tempted to look, and right now there are more than 100,000 books that are higher ranked!Luckily, as a scientist I put a bigger premium on influence. I want the Genius Checklist to exert an impact on what people know about the science of genius. I’d like to get them beyond the popular myths and stereotypes associated with world-class creators. And insofar as the scientific results have any practical use, then may this book lead to real-world applications. Such as helping parents who find themselves with a highly gifted child, or teachers who find that same child disrupting their classroom, or prospective employers who are grappling with a job applicant with a rather unusual résumé once that child grows up.Who knows? The volume might even enjoy a positive influence on future research as well. A reader might be a scientist who becomes inspired by one of the paradoxical tips to conduct original inquires. Or the book might be assigned in an undergraduate course that then has repercussions when a student later goes to graduate school and selects some issue for their doctoral thesis and later research program—like I did more than four decades ago.Am I fantasizing again? It’s way too early to know, given the recent publication date. But I’m hopeful. I just learned that the book will be translated into Mandarin and Japanese. So right there I have a substantial increase in potential bookstore and online browsers. Besides, the worst-case scenario is not all that bad anyway. I wrote a book that needed to be written. It was put out by a prestigious publisher that did excellent production and promotion. Plus, I received an invitation for this interview!