Cranky Books publishes books, essays, satire, field notes, and practical tools for people trying to stay sane inside modern work, technology, ambition, and daily professional theater.
Some of it is serious. Some of it is satire. Much of it lives in the uncomfortable place where both are true.
We write about the systems people have to live inside: jobs, offices, hiring, housing, media, status, AI, language, and all the small absurdities that somehow become official procedure.
The job market has become strange, crowded, automated, and often brutally indifferent.
Candidates are told to be resilient, authentic, strategic, technically fluent, emotionally intelligent, and grateful — preferably while applying into systems that may never acknowledge they exist.
Get Hired in a Broken Job Market is a practical field manual for people who need work now. It does not promise magic, secret algorithms, or motivational wallpaper. It offers something more useful: a clear-eyed strategy for navigating the modern hiring mess without losing your nerve, your dignity, or your grip on reality.
The book covers résumés, AI, outreach, interviews, proof-first hiring, recruiters, networking, rejection, offers, and the daily discipline of staying visible in a market that often behaves as if applicants are disposable.
For recent graduates, career changers, laid-off professionals, and anyone staring into the fluorescent cave of online applications, this book offers practical guidance with a cranky edge.
The market may be broken. You do not have to be.
>AttentionYouTube visitors:
Job search tools mentioned in our video presentations have been relocated to our new Broken Job Market Website
We have become remarkably good at looking composed.
At work. On Zoom. On social media. Over overpriced coffee. In meetings where no one understands the PowerPoint but everyone is nodding anyway.
Cool on the Outside, Screaming on the Inside is a short, sharp, satirical look at the performance of modern composure — the strange little act most of us put on every day to convince the world, and occasionally ourselves, that everything is completely under control.
It usually isn’t.
Charlie O’Neill writes about the doubts, absurdities, status games, professional rituals, private anxieties, and mental fire drills taking place just beneath the pleasant expression.
Along the way you’ll meet Brand Mavrick, creative director at the fictional Panopticon Agency, who has elevated appearing confident while privately questioning everything into something close to an art form.
This isn’t self-help. There are no seven steps to becoming a better human being.
It’s satire with an uncomfortable amount of truth in it.
If you have ever looked perfectly competent while quietly thinking, What the hell am I doing? — this book may feel disturbingly familiar.
>View our Cool on the Outside You Tube channel
>Here's a link to Charlie's conversation with WBZ 1030 News Radio's Dan Rea on Nightside, iHeart Radio (Starts at 24:58)
>Hear the free audiobook edition of Cool
>How Cool Are You, Really?
A companion instrument to Cool on the Outside, Screaming on the Inside. The test already knows.
A 13-question audit scored across five factors (Reliability, Ego Tax, Communication Debt, Political Exposure, Warmth), landing on one of eleven profiles: The Ghostwriter, The Reply-All Menace, The Credit Vulture, The Landmine, The Office Weathervane, The Human Fire Drill, The Undead Optimist, The Silent Auditor, The Feedback Sponge, The Actually Fine One (rare, and the instrument says so), and The Working Average as the floor.
CrankyBooks also publishes essays and notes and You Tube videos on work, technology, writing, culture, AI, ambition, publishing, and the exhausting theater of modern competence.
The longer pieces tend to be essays, arguments, and public observations. The shorter pieces are field notes, stray thoughts, updates, fragments, and dispatches from inside the Cranky Books workshop.
The Panopticon Agency is a fictional advertising agency from the CrankyBooks universe — part satire, part cultural X-ray, and part warning label for modern professional life.
It is where Brand Mavrick’s corporate world expands into mock memos, strange campaigns, essays, office absurdities, and observations from inside the machinery.
New books, essays, tools, and related projects will appear here as they develop.
CrankyBooks is not a single book or a single joke. It is a small publishing workshop for practical guidance, cultural complaint, satire, and the occasional useful tool — all aimed at people who suspect the modern world may have gotten a little too pleased with itself.
Cranky Books is assembling a group of advance readers for upcoming books and field guides.
Advance readers may receive early chapters, draft materials, book updates, and opportunities to provide candid feedback before publication. We may ask for your opinion, send you something free, or give you advance notice when a new project is coming together.
Honest reactions are welcome. Agreement is not required.
No corporate “thought leadership.” No daily inspirational foghorn. Just occasional notes from CrankyBooks when we have something worth sharing.
Write to us info@crankybooks.com or call 781.226.4529
Copyright © 2025–2026 Charles O’Neill and CrankyBooks. All rights reserved.
Some material on this site was researched, developed, edited, or produced with the assistance of AI tools, using source material selected or provided by the author. Images and videos may also have been created with AI assistance. Editorial and creative decisions remain the author’s.
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320 Boston Post Road
Suite 18-114
Darien, CT 06820
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