I’m incredibly excited to announce that I am writing a book called Weapons of Math Destruction for Random House books, with my editor Amanda Cook. There will also be a subtitle which we haven’t decided on yet.

Here’s how this whole thing went down. First I met my amazing book agent Jay Mandel from William Morris though my buddy Jordan Ellenberg. As many of you know, Jordan is also writing a book but it’s much farther along in the process and has already passed the editing phase. Jordan’s book is called How Not To Be Wrong and it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon.

Anyhoo, Jay spent a few months with me telling me how to write a book proposal, and it was a pretty substantial undertaking actually and required more than just an outline. It was like a short treatment of all the chapters but then two chapters pretty filled in, including the first, and as you know the first is kind of like an advertisement for the whole rest of the book.

Then, once that proposal was ready, Jay started what he hoped would be a bidding war for the proposal among publishers. He had a whole list of people he talked to from all over the place in the publishing world.

What actually happened though was Amanda Cook from Crown Publishing, which is part of Random House, was the first person who was interested enough to talk to me about it, and then we hit it off really well, and she made a pre-emptive offer for the book so the full on bidding war didn’t end up needing to happen. And then just last week she announced the deal in what’s called the Publisher’s Marketplace, which is for people inside publishing to keep abreast of the deals and news. The actual link is here, but it’s behind a pay wall, so Amanda got me a screen shot:

If that font is too small, it says something like this:

Harvard math Ph.D., former Wall Street quant, and advisor to the Occupy movement Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, arguing that mathematical modeling has become a pervasive and destructive force in society—in finance, education, medicine, politics, and the workplace—and showing how current models exacerbate inequality and endanger democracy and how we might rein them in, to Amanda Cook at Crown in a pre-empt by Jay Mandel at William Morris Endeavor (NA).

So as you can tell I’m incredibly excited about the book, and I have tons of ideas about it, but of course I’d love my readers to weigh in on crucial examples of models and industries that you think might get overlooked.

Please, post a comment or send me an email (located on my About page) with your favorite example of a family of models (Value Added Model for teachers is already in!) or a specific model (Value-at-Risk model in finance in already!) that is illustrative of feedback loops, or perverted incentives, or creepy modeling, or some such concept that you imagine I’ll be writing about (or should be!). Thanks so much for your input!

One last thing. I’m aiming to finish the writing part by next Spring, and then the book is actually released about 9 months later. It takes a while. I’m super glad I have had the experience of writing a technical book with O’Reilly as well as the homemade brew Occupy Finance with my Occupy group so I know at least some of the ropes, but even so this is a bit more involved.