You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News: Shocking but Utterly True Facts is a New York Times bestselling book from the staff of Cracked.com, which is the most visited humor website in the world.[2][3] Published in 2010 by Plume, the book is a crowdsourced effort led by Cracked.com's editorial staff and more than 2,500 contributors from all over the world.[4]
Background
Cracked.com was founded in 2006 and currently receives over 300 million monthly page views.[5]Cracked.com publishes at least one 2,000 – 3,000 word article every day of the week, most of which are read by over a million people.[6][7] Their longtime editorial staff includes original editor-in-chief Jack O'Brien, David Wong who was added as an associate editor later in 2006, and Oren Katzeff who became Cracked.com's General Manager in November 2007 after running business development for Yahoo Media Group.[2][8]
The title was inspired by one of Cracked.com's most popular articles called "5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen".[9][10]Michael Swaim, a Cracked writer, notes that "Cracked.com has really been built on tricking you into learning stuff and [the book] is just a very natural extension of that."[10]
Synopsis
The comedytrivia book is composed of 38 articles, including 20 of the site's most popular articles.[11] The additional 18 articles are exclusive to the book. The topics include the Zombie apocalypse, disgusting facts about bugs allowed in your food by the Food and Drug Administration, the secret menace that is dolphins, and other such facts. The book is written in Cracked.com's popular "listicle" format.[12][13]
