A children's book for parents: the online hit goes into print

The ‘profane and affectionate’ online story ‘Go the F**k to Sleep’ sums up the addled mindset of sleep-deprived parents. And now the internet hit is to be published in hardcopy

“The cats nestle close to their kittens now.

The lambs have laid down with the sheep. You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear.

Please go the f**k to sleep.”

With these four short lines a publishing phenomenon has been born. Go the F**k to Sleep, written by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortés, will not be published in the US until next week but already the "children's book for adults", as Mansbach has called it, is a best-seller on amazon.com. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in pre-orders and the film rights have been optioned by Fox.

It may not have as much resonance with children as The Gruffalo, but their parents are likely to enjoy it a whole lot more. And it all started as a Facebook joke.

This time last year, try as he might, Mansbach couldn't get his two-year-old daughter, Vivien, to sleep, so, taking a break from external lullabies and stories and internal screams of frustration and existential rage, he updated his Facebook status. "Look out for my forthcoming children's book, Go the F**k to Sleep," it said simply.

His friends thought the status update was hilarious, and the response prompted him to write a single verse: “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 bulls**t. Stop lying. / Lie the f**k down, my darling, and sleep.”

From there it took off. Although piracy has been rampant in music and film, the publishing world has not been affected to the same degree. Until now. Go the F**k to Sleephas become the first book to go properly viral: over the past three months a PDF version has been e-mailed all over the world by hundreds of thousands of people, initially to the annoyance of its prospective publisher, the Brooklyn-based Akashic Books.

Publicly, Akashic has said it wants to clamp down on the unsanctioned distribution of its suddenly precious asset. “As the publisher of this book, our responsibility is to tackle instances of piracy when we become aware of them . . . That’s just doing a service to our authors, ourselves, booksellers, distributors, to everyone involved in the successful making and promotion of a book.”

Privately, however, Akashic could not be more pleased about the viral campaign, given the impact it has had on pre-sales of the book. Pirated music, software and films take the place of original product, but consumers who have read the PDF of Go the F**k to Sleep still want to buy the book when it comes out. It had an initial print run of 10,000 and was scheduled for publication this autumn, but the run has now risen to more than 300,000, and the date has been brought forward to this month.

Akashic stresses that it is “definitely not a book to read to your child”, but says “it will resonate with anyone who has ever spent 20 minutes, 40 minutes, four hours, reading ‘just one more bedtime story’ ”. The publisher is not wrong. This chronically sleep-deprived writer, with two children aged under four, cried with laughter reading it for the first time.

Mansbach daughter’s Vivien is now three, and Mansbach is sleeping better. “Initially the audience was me and my wife,” he said recently. “It captures the frustration of being in a room with a kid and feeling like you may actually never leave that room again, that you may spend the rest of your life in that dark room, trying to get your kid to go to sleep.”

And capture it he does. As the 32 pages go on, his desperation mounts: “The tiger reclines in the simmering jungle. / The sparrow has silenced her cheep. / F**k your stuffed bear, I’m not getting you s**t. / Close your eyes. Cut the crap. Sleep.”

He has said he wrote it as “a reflection of my own personal reality. I wanted to write about the way that I felt and be honest about it . . . I think our generation talks so much about parenting, you almost can’t get away from it. But there’s a certain lack of honesty in a lot of it.”

He adds that a “lot of people’s self-image is caught up in their desire to see themselves as good parents . . . Piercing that image is exactly what’s needed. Reading it can be cathartic.”

He has described the book as both “profane and affectionate. It’s actually about being a good parent. No child is being mistreated. It’s about being affectionate to a child even when you can’t wait to get out of the f**king room.”