The story behind the bestselling children’s book ‘Go the F**k to Sleep’ and a new book!

The book Go The F**k to Sleep has sold more than two million copies. It’s commonly carefully wrapped in pink or blue wrapping paper and ripped open to squeals of laughter at countless baby showers. Its audio version is voiced by Samuel L Jackson. And more than four years after its release, it still pops up on the New York Times bestseller list.

A few months ago I was at a Seattle storytelling event and the author, Adam Mansbach, was there telling the book’s origin story. I figured, if I don’t know this story, maybe you don’t know it either. So I called him up in Berkeley, California for an interview.

“My daughter Vivian was two-and-a-half and she was in many ways a remarkable and amazing, beautiful, lovely kid. Sleep just was not on her list of priorities. You know, I was often in her room for two hours, two-and-a-half hours, trying to get her to go to sleep,” Mansbach said. “On one hand, it’s nice to be in the room of the person you love most in the world. On the other hand, that two hours comprises the entirety of time to yourself. Time you might spend speaking to an adult or drinking a glass of wine.”

So he folded his personal frustrations into a rhythmic story book, only intending to share it with friends and family.

“I was a literary novelist at the time. So I’d work for two years, four years, five years on a novel, pour my heart into it. I wrote this book in, maybe, 35 minutes. I also wrote it, initially, unlike pretty much anything else I would write, without really any intention of publishing it,” he said. “I wrote it as a joke and as something to read aloud maybe one time. But the response that I got was significant enough that I started to think that maybe it was, in some way, publishable.”

Turns out it was publishable and his 35 minutes of work has paid off in spades.

“So the book was initially supposed to be published in October of 2011. But about six months before that, in April, I gave a public reading of the book at a museum in Philadelphia. It was very well received and people went home and started pre-ordering it. Coincidentally, the book’s Amazon page had just gone up earlier that week. And when I woke up the next morning, I thought to check the book’s Amazon rating and and found that it was [rated] 125th in books, which is an absurdly low number,” Mansbach said. “My literary novels never cracked four figures, much less three. So something was clearly going on. By the end of the week it had jumped all the way up to number one. Which was, on one hand, incredible, and on the other hand terrifying because the book did not yet exist. It hadn’t even been printed yet. So we started rushing the book toward publication, aiming to get it out in June, in time for Father’s Day.”

A week after the reading, the worst possible scenarios happened: the manuscript was leaked and the PDF of the book was posted all over Internet.

“We were terrified. We thought we were dead in the water. We were sending people cease and desists,” Mansbach said. “I remember writing a letter to this one woman in Australia who had posted the whole book as a Facebook album. And saying, ‘Hey look, I’m glad you’re so enthusiastic about this. But could you please take it down? We’d really like to sell some copies.’ And she wrote me back, telling me that in the past 24 hours, 500 people had asked her where they could buy the book and she was sending them all to Amazon. And I was like, ‘Uh, okay. Well, you know, carry on then.'”

Of course, the book still sold because nobody wants to bring a stapled together PDF to a baby shower.

Mansbach’s previous writing focused around race and class and culture and religion. But he’s moved into new territory, and he has a new middle grade book series out this week.

“Called Benjamin Franklin: Huge Pain in My Ass. Although ‘ass’ will be replaced with asterisks. I’m co-writing with Alan Zweibel, who was one of the original Saturday Night Live writers and has written for Curb Your Enthusiasm. That’s a book about a kid in the present who begins to exchange letters through time with Benjamin Franklin in 1776.”

Mansbach says one thing he’s learned through his whirlwind book success, is that parents really just appreciate a little honesty. Kids are awesome, but they can also a pain in the asterisk. And somebody finally wrote a book about it.