How do you take an unpublished, expletive-ridden book to the top of Amazon sales list? You're about to find out from the man who did just that.
On 23 April, at an arts salon in Philadelphia, Adam Mansbach read some verses from Go The Fuck To Sleep, an illustrated children's book you don't actually want to read to your kids.
Sample: "The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest / And the creatures who crawl, run and creep / I know you're not thirsty.
That's bullshit. Stop lying. / Lie the fuck down, darling, and sleep."
Afterwards, Mansbach went home to bed. When he woke, Go The Fuck To Sleep had gone from being unranked on the Amazon sales list to number 125. It wasn't supposed to be published until October. The book went viral and soon hit number one, supposedly after pirated PDFs started doing the rounds online. Go The Fuck To Sleep is now being translated into 12 languages and will be made into a film by Fox 2000; shooting starts in January.
Mansbach tells Wired.co.uk about the secret behind the book's success (he doesn't know), how important the pirated PDF was (it wasn't) and his new graphic novel in which drugged-up humans face animals in one-on-one combat to prevent an alien invasion (awesome). Give it a fucking read.
Why did Go The Fuck To Sleep become popular overnight?
The Tuesday after the book reading, the book was up at number two. It was not really clear to me what was happening. The bootleg PDFs of the book hadn't started circulating yet -- that happened a couple of weeks later. Some people have said that that was what set it off, but it really wasn't. It wasn't clear to me, and I'm not expert on social media or the interwebs, so... It was just sort of crazy. The success brought with it its own wave of media. And that began to sustain it and further it. We were in this perfect storm situation, where every bit of coverage we did get could only point potential buyers in one direction, and that was to Amazon. Everything got funnelled to the same place. Any interest in the book led people to the Amazon pre-order page. And at that point all people had to go was a title, the cover and a sample verse, and a product description. That seemed to be enough.
So what did the pirated PDFs contribute?
It's hard to say. Ultimately it probably did help, in that it allowed people to see that it delivered on the promise of the premise. Those things ricocheted all over the internet. We -- the publisher, the authors -- were mortified by it and spent days if not weeks trying to send cease and desist orders trying to take them down. That shows you what level of understanding we have of any of this stuff.
What it did was make them realise that reading it wasn't enough.
They had to hold it in their hands, that it was a gift book, and these low resolution PDFS -- what are you gonna do, print it out, staple it together and give it to someone for Father's Day? Not really.
So the piracy helped?
It helped us. It could just as easily have hurt us. I feel weird being too celebratory about it because we don't know what would have happened. Karschik [the US publisher of Go The Fuck To Sleep] is a small publisher that like most small publishers has very little margin for failure. When it's a small independent house like this, piracy could be something that potentially destroys them. In this case it seems not to have.
The book started life as a Facebook post -- do you think the concept was inherently viral?
That may be true. I sort of jokingly put on Facebook one day, "look out for my forthcoming Facebook book Go The Fuck To Sleep". I don't use Facebook in a major way: it's not like I had some huge outpouring of response. Eventually I actually sat down as was probably inevitable all along and just wrote it. The subject matter and illustrations created this perfect storm for a thing that could be disseminated and passed along.
You've also written prize-winning novels. Are you worried about piracy with those, or would you hope for a similar effect?
Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel. It's not quite the same.
Do you think books are more immune to piracy than music, say?
Sadly, ultimately it's true because there's less demand. Plain and sample. There's a lot of demand to hear the new Kanye West album before it hits the streets. There's much less demand to read the new Phillip Roth novel.
What are you writing now?
I'm writing a 250-page graphic novel that is coming out in February. The premise is that a race of hostile aliens is on its way to destroy Earth. And the only person who knows about is a kind of megalomaniacal media baron, kind of a cross between Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin. He knows because a rebel faction of aliens has contacted him in the hope he can do something about it.
So what he is charged with doing, essentially, is selecting a gladiator to represent earth in one-on-one combat against these alien forces. So he sets up an inter-species tournament in which animals are made to fight each other in the hope of selecting a champion.
**Nice. And will you be involved in with the film of
Go The Fuck To Sleep?**
If by involved you mean attending the premiere, then yes.
*Go the Fuck to Sleep will be published by Akashic Books in the US and Canongate in the UK on June 16th, priced £9.99. Words ©
2011 Adam Mansbach, illustrations © 2011 Ricardo Cortes*
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
