# Please introduce yourself and your book(s)!
Somebody is standing in a store aisle right now, phone in one hand and a bottle in the other, trying to work out whether the thing in front of them will help them or hurt them. That person is who I write for.
I’m Zane Sampson. I write as Zane369, from home in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I spent more than ten years in natural health retail, including a stretch managing a Natural Grocers store, so the aisle is where I learned my trade. My book is SOLD ON FEAR: How the Wellness Industry Turned Fear Into a Business Model, and How to Take Your Mind Back. It came out in September 2026, self-published through Lulu, $22.22 for the ebook. The short version of the whole book is this: the products are not the enemy. The villain is the fear machine, the marketing built on top of good products to scare people into buying more of them.
# What is/are the real-life story(ies) behind your book(s)?
There is no single dramatic moment. There are about ten years of small ones. I was the guy behind the counter and out on the floor, and day after day I watched the same scene. A customer would come in holding something they had read about or seen in a headline, already worried, and the fear did the selling before I said a word. Sometimes they bought the thing. Sometimes they bought three things. A lot of the time what they actually needed was somebody to read the back of the package with them and slow the whole moment down.
I did that thousands of times. Read the label. Talk through what was actually in it. Separate what a product can honestly do from what the advertising claims it does. At some point I realized I was having the same conversation over and over, and the conversation deserved to be a book. SOLD ON FEAR is that conversation, written down.
# What inspires/inspired your creativity?
Reader questions, mostly. People write to me with real questions about real products. A label they cannot decode. A claim that sounds too good. A headline that scared them at the grocery store. Those questions are better than any idea I could sit around inventing, because somebody actually needs the answer.
The aisle itself still inspires me too. I will walk into a store, pick something up, turn it over, and there is a chapter. The material is not hard to find. It is on every shelf.
# How do you deal with creative block?
I go back to a real question from a real reader. If I am stuck, it usually means I am trying to write in the abstract, and abstract is where I do my worst work. A specific person with a specific bottle in their hand fixes that fast.
The other thing I do is refuse to force it. If I have nothing true to say on a given day, I do not publish filler and call it content. I would rather be quiet for a day than hand a reader something I do not believe. The block usually breaks on its own once I stop performing and start answering somebody.
# What are the biggest mistakes you can make in a book?
The biggest one is lying to the reader, even politely. In my corner of the world that looks like overclaiming. Saying a product does more than it does. Burying the limits. Writing a scary chapter because fear sells, when the honest version would have been calmer and smaller. Readers can feel that, even when they cannot name it.
After that: talking down to people. My readers are smart. They are busy, they are bombarded, and they are trying to take care of their families. A book that treats them like they are foolish for being confused has failed before it starts. And the last one is burying the useful part. If a reader finishes a chapter and does not know anything they can actually use, that chapter was for me, not for them.
# Do you have tips on choosing titles and covers?
The title should say the true thing, plainly. SOLD ON FEAR is the title because fear is the product I watched get sold for a decade. There is no tease in it and no puzzle to solve. A reader knows what the book is before they open it, and I think that honesty is part of why it works.
The cover took longer. Twelve versions. I kept pushing until it looked like the book felt: serious, rich, intentional, not cheap and not shouting. The mistake I made early was letting the cover drift toward looking dramatic for its own sake. A cover that promises a different book than the one inside is a small lie, and small lies are the whole thing I write against. Keep going until the cover tells the truth about the pages behind it.
# How do bad reviews and negative feedback affect you and how do you deal with them?
I read them. All of them. If there is something true in a hard review, I want to know it, because the reader did me a favor by saying it out loud. Where I push back, quietly and only in my own head, is when the complaint is that the book did not do the fear thing. That it was not scarier, more alarming, more certain. That is the one criticism I will happily accept forever.
What I do not do is argue with readers in public. A person who spent money on my book and did not like it has earned their opinion. I take the useful part, leave the rest, and write the next thing better.
# How has your creation process improved over time?
On the retail floor, my process was talk first and check later, because a customer was standing in front of me. Writing has slowed me down in a good way. Now I check claims before they go anywhere near a page. If a number is in the book, I know where it came from. If I cannot back something up, it comes out, no matter how good the sentence sounds.
I also write closer to the way I talk than I used to. Early on I caught myself writing the way I thought an author was supposed to sound, and it sounded like nobody. The work got better when it started sounding like the guy who used to read labels with people in the aisle. Because that is who wrote it.
# What were the best, worst and most surprising things you encountered during the entire process of completing your book(s)?
The best thing was doing it myself. I am the publisher of record on SOLD ON FEAR. No gatekeeper told me to make it scarier or softer or more like somebody else’s book. Whatever is in there, I stand behind every page, and that feeling is worth a lot.
The worst thing was the finishing. The cover alone took twelve versions, and there is a long stretch near the end of any book where the writing is done and the work is not, and nobody warns you about that part.
The most surprising thing connects to that. I expected the hard part to be the writing. It was not. The hard part was everything after the writing: the cover, the listings, the thousand small decisions. The book was the easy half.
# Do you tend towards personal satisfaction or aim to serve your readers? Do you balance the two and how?
Readers, and it is not close. My test for keeping a chapter is simple. Does this help the person standing in the aisle? If a section only satisfies me, if it exists because I enjoyed writing it or wanted to sound clever, it gets cut.
The balance, if you can call it that, is that serving readers honestly happens to be the satisfying part. I got into this because the conversation at the counter mattered to me. Writing the book version of that conversation, for a lot more people than one store could hold, is the satisfaction. They are the same thing when I do it right.
# What role do emotions play in creativity?
A big one, and I try to be honest about which emotion is doing the work. Conviction is the useful one. I believe readers are being played, and I believe they are smart enough to see through it with a little help. That belief keeps me at the desk.
The emotion I watch out for is anger, mine included. Anger is good fuel for starting and bad fuel for finishing. A chapter written angry comes out scolding, and my readers are not the enemy, so it would be aimed at the wrong people. The fear machine is the target. Keeping that straight is most of the discipline.
# Do you have any creativity tricks?
Nothing fancy. I keep the questions readers send me, and when I need a place to start, I start with one of those. A real question already has tension in it, because somebody is genuinely unsure about something that matters to them.
The other one is embarrassingly simple. I go read a label. My own kitchen, a store shelf, it does not matter. Ten years of habit means the back of a package is where my brain starts working. Writers have stranger rituals than reading ingredient lists, I am sure.
# What are your plans for future books?
I do not have a second book to announce, and I would rather say that plainly than tease one. The writing continues either way. I publish on Substack, where the label work and the reader questions keep going, and the audience there keeps growing.
If there is a next book, it will come out of the same place this one did: the questions people keep asking that one conversation at a counter cannot hold. When enough of those pile up around one subject, that is a book asking to be written. I will know it when I see it.
# Tell us some quirky facts about yourself
I priced the book at $22.22, which tells you something about how my brain works with numbers. I write from home in Sioux Falls with two young sons underfoot, a dog named Ellie, and two cats who consider my desk their property. I own a trail camera and check it with more dedication than most people check their email. And after more than a decade of reading labels professionally, I still turn over every package in my own kitchen before it goes in the cart. Some habits you do not retire.
Links
Book, SOLD ON FEAR (Lulu): https://www.lulu.com/shop/zane-sampson/sold-on-fear-the-ebook-exposing-how-the-wellness-industry-profits-from-fear/ebook/product-2mg8dqq.html
All links in one place (Linktree): https://linktr.ee/zane369sampson
Newsletter (Substack): https://zanesampson.substack.com
Website: https://www.zanesampson.com