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Interview with a Zombie: Oren Katzeff of Cracked.com
 Hitting shelves today, “You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News” is a hilarious new book from our award-winning comedy website Cracked.com, and it’s packed with mind-blowing facts and shockingly-true stories meant to thrill fans of intelligent edutainment. And to get the facts and stories behind the book, I chatted with Oren Katzeff, general manager of Cracked.com.AW: So what can legions of diehard Cracked fans look forward to with “You Might Be A Zombie and Other Bad News”? OK: It’s a collection of 18 never-before-seen articles, created specifically for the book, plus some of the best ones we’ve ever featured on Cracked.com that have been freshly updated and illustrated. For the uninitiated, Cracked articles combine shockingly-true trivia with what we call “comedy with a college education.” Some of the new titles in the book range from “The Five Creepiest Urban Legends that Happen to Be True” to “Five Psychological Experiments that Prove Humanity Is Doomed." AW: Any personal favorites you can preview for us here?  AW: I noticed the cover says “From the Editors of Cracked.com.” How did they decide which pieces to feature? OK: Cracked’s full-time editorial team chose some of their favorite existing pieces and then turned to our online writer’s workshop to participate in the creation of new, original articles for the book. The great thing about Cracked.com is that the content originates from our audience – we’re effectively creating high-quality, crowdsourced comedy. Anyone with a killer idea can write for us. We have weekly editorial meetings where we pool the best pitches of the week from the online workshop, choose the best ones, and then our editors work with those writers to polish their articles for publication. Dan O’Brien, one of our editors (and star of our Streamy-winning video series “Agents of Cracked”), just wrote a blog post about how our mission at Cracked is to make it easier for aspiring comedy writers to get published online, and now with this book, even offline. AW: With Christmas behind us, I’m sure you’re getting asked a lot about the December 28 release date. OK: We chose December 28 as the perfect day to celebrate Crackedmas, which is all about surviving the over-hyped, over-scheduled, over-commercialized parts of the holidays and coming home to discover this awesome book waiting for you on your doorstep. There’s no right or wrong way to celebrate Crackedmas, and we’re sure you’ll get way more hours of entertainment from “You Might Be A Zombie” than you will from anything your cat-lady aunt bought you. Plus, December 28th is the legendary Stan Lee’s birthday, and he was kind enough to give us a glowing review. AW: Speaking of Stan Lee, the comic book-style artwork in here is really cool.  AW: Cracked.com is one of the most visited humor brands online, so why go offline and publish a book? OK: Cracked’s roots were in print publishing, having started out as a humor magazine in 1958. We’ve spent the past several years really building up the brand by introducing it to an entirely new audience online, and now that we’re one of the biggest names in online comedy, going back into print gives us the unique opportunity to reintroduce Cracked to a large audience of readers that may not have heard of the website. AW: So does that mean there will be more books coming from Cracked? OK: If this goes well, we’ll definitely look at doing a series. If this goes poorly, we’ll look at pretending this all never happened. AW: You’re stuck on a desert island and you can bring along three books. Assuming this is one of them, what are the other two? OK: The Bible and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. That'll give me a chance to spend eternity with the three best-selling books of all time. “You Might Be A Zombie and Other Bad News” is now available at all major book retailers, including Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon, as well as for the Kindle and NOOKbook. Adam Weinroth is VP of Strategic Marketing for Demand Media. Follow him at @aweinroth.
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