Tell us what your book, “F#ck Nervous System Hacks. Calm Down for Free.,” is about!
Sure! Here’s the summary:
Somewhere along the way, everybody learned their nervous system was broken, and someone had a repair kit ready at checkout: a $269 neck device, ear clips that promise a reset in minutes, a coaching app that bills monthly, a course that ends in a certificate. This book is a funny, sourced tour of that industry. Greg, a burned-out hustle guru, spends a month buying all of it so you don't have to, and you get the free version instead: slow breathing, sleep, cold water, a walk. Book 4 of The F*ck It Files, with every claim traced to a source in the Receipts at the back.
What did you love most about writing this book?
Chapter twelve, honestly. It's a list of calming things that are weird, free, and surprisingly well studied: chewing gum, laughing at something dumb, petting an actual dog (a slideshow of the same dog didn't count in the trial), getting a hug. Each one comes with an honest label, so one small study from 2009 gets called exactly that.
After eleven chapters of reading marketing copy, writing it felt like opening a window. Also, I got to write a joke about a moose and call it research.
How did you start writing?
By checking things. A piece of advice would go viral, and I'd go find the original study, and a surprising amount of the time the study said something more modest, or something different. I started keeping notes on the gap. Those notes grew into the first book, about goal culture, and the series has followed the same method ever since: find the claim, find the source, laugh at the distance between them.
Tell us a little bit about your self-publishing experience.
I publish through Amazon KDP, and these books are short and sourced by design.
The biggest lesson was that writing the book is maybe half the work. The other half is all the small, unglamorous stuff: a description that tells a stranger what's inside, a cover that reads at thumbnail size, and getting listed in the places readers already browse. Self-publishing hands you every one of those jobs. I've come to like that, mostly because nobody can tell me a sourced humor book is an impossible category.
What was your biggest challenge in bringing the book to market, and how did you solve it?
The title. It has a swear word in it, and plenty of promotion sites, ad networks, and newsletters won't run profanity, masked or not.
What worked was keeping the joke on the cover and taking it out of everything else. The title is spelled F#ck, the descriptions stay clean, and the pitch leads with the research and the humor rather than the shock. A few channels still say no. That's fine. The readers who'd be offended by the cover were never going to enjoy chapter one anyway.
What's one piece of advice you have for other writers?
Finish the boring part early. For me, that's the source list. Once every fact I plan to use is written down with where it came from, the drafting goes fast, because I'm no longer stopping every paragraph to wonder whether something is true.
Anything else you want folks to know?
This is a book that pokes fun at an industry, never at people who are struggling. When it's more than a bad week, chapter thirteen has no jokes and points to real help. The rest of the series is on my Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/E-Aspen/e/B0HK3NWBRQ
Where can people find your book?
