Why Write a Book When You've Got a Bestselling Title?
Go the F**k to Sleep and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies prove the book part of "best-selling book" is entirely optional. Now all you need is a title.
This week Go the F**k to Sleep will debut at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. On Tuesday, more than 400 people paid to go to a launch event at the New York Public Library featuring a recorded reading by German director Werner Herzog. The audiobook with Samuel L. Jackson narrating is already a major Internet "thing." (I look forward to the movie: Go the F**k to Sleep All You Mother****ing Snakes On A Plane.) Nor is this only a U.S. phenom. Publisher Akashic Books says it has signed contracts for 15 foreign editions with four more in the works.
All this for a book that started as a joke on Facebook.
The trend started with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which sold more than 750,000 copies. Publisher Quirk Books turned this into a business model by following Zombies with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters which sold more than 375,000 copies. Speaking as someone who has read both a lot of Jane Austen and a lot of zombie books (current fave: The Passage by Justin Cronin), P&P&Z was a lousy parody of both. I gave up reading after 50 or so pages.
All you have to do is read the sample pages of Go the F**k to Sleep to see that the beauty here is also skin deep. In its favor let me say that F**K has a much deeper emotional resonance than P&P&Z. Like every other parent of a toddler, I had times when this title was the most wished for thing on the planet.
I think of this as The Onion-izing of us all. America's Finest News Source is great at coming up with headlines that are absolutely hilarious which lead to articles where all you can say is, "What a great headline." (My favorite is about the Titanic from the book Our Dumb Century: Iceberg Hits Metaphor.)
I absolutely do not mean this as a slam against The Onion. The writers there are great and funny and never fail to deliver. I have happily bought their books knowing that I would get a generous helping of these headlines. What I don't understand is why people are paying for one headline and a bunch of empty pages.
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