We received these photos from Bookshop Santa Cruz, an independent bookseller (rocking since 1966!) that’s been featuring the breadpig-published xkcd: volume 0 for the last couple of months.
Not only has it been a best-seller (there are evidently quite a few well-tanned geeks in Santa Cruz) but an employee there wrote up a ’shelf talker’ for the book, which you can see pictured above and has been transcribed below for your reading delight.
XKCD by Randall Munroe
If you’re not an avid XKCD reader, or haven’t been forwarded one of these fantastic web-comics by a friend, now’s your chance to get in on one of the smartest, nerdiest and most romantic online comic strips. Munroe’s long-running comic has finally been compiled into one book, so you can revisit your favorite strips, discover one you might have missed, or become a newly converted fan.—KMS
Breadpig loves independent booksellers [see our entry on Borderlandands Books -- first bookstore in the universe to carry xkcd: volume 0] and we’re working on a great way to show off that love that should also be a handy tool for all of you xkcd fans. In the meantime, we’re happy to spotlight some outstanding indies who’ve really gone above and beyond for this book (and their customers who are demanding it).
Hopefully you’ve read part one about how breadpig made $53,000 in 3 months and thus come to the conclusion that you’re interested in learning how a professional-grade book gets made. Also consider reading/sharing our tutorial on how we made LOLmagnetz (a tidy profit, too). And if you’re planning on using this information to build a competing geeky book publisher (or magnet maker) to rival breadpig, more power to you!
1. Produce book content
This is obviously a lot easier when, say, you’re just assembling previously released comics, but a lot of thought goes into the flow of a book. And in the case of xkcd, Randall had to redraw a number of the comics in high-resolution because the originals were lost in the infamous laptop theft of 2007.
BONUS! Do something different
We only had a couple conference calls to discuss the book. One of the longest discussions was about how we handle the famous xkcd hover text. There were some creative, albeit impractical, ideas; my favorite is still Jeremy’s magic-glasses version that would let a user built her own red&blue glasses to perceive the scrambled hover text beneath each comic. Randall suggested mimicking the tiny copyright text found in most newspaper comics, which jaded eyes usually skipped altogether – it was perfect.
But we all really wanted to add something special to this book – something geeky. It started with a unique page numbering system (credit Davean for the skew binary), but we at breadpig were really pushing for some kind of easter egg or puzzles in the book for people to decipher. Randall suggested something he’d seen in Dilbert books (I think) where Scott Adams wrote interesting annotations that added some nice flavor. He thought he could do the same and possibly also come up with a few puzzles.
Oh, he’s a sneaky one. Those ‘few puzzles’ he, Davean, and a few of their friends (sorry, I don’t know your names) worked on are an elaborate web of cyphers and enigmas. To my knowledge, in the 5 months since the book was released, no one not connected with the book has solved them all. The person who does will be King/Queen of the Internet that day, that’s for sure.
Just because the medium is ink on paper, doesn’t mean you can’t bring in elements of digital geekery. It only means an opportunity to surprise a reader with preconceived notions of what to expect in a book.
2. Digital layout
If you don’t know how to use Adobe InDesign, hire someone who can. I got a great recommendation from friend Zak Stone (YC 2005) to use the talents of LeeAnn Suen, who also happened to be a big xkcd fan. If you need to contract this work out, I highly recommend her. Not only did she do our first layout and update it when Randall did a near total redesign, she also was there for all the last minute “OMG?! HALP!” moments.
Extra tips from Marie: If you’re going to design the book yourself, leave generous margins for important content. If you’re going to do a fancy books with cross-over bleeds (images that go across a 2 page spread), please talk to your printer about how much space you need to leave in the gutter (the place where the book binds). Even experienced designers forget about gutter space, and you’ll end up having to make costly corrections in the proofing stage.
3. ISBN
Don’t forget that sexy number and SKU on every professional book so that robots can track it. Tip of the hat to Joe Peacock (who knows a thing or two about publishing and self-publishing) for recommending Bowker.com as a dead simple way to score an ISBN and barcode for $150 (update: based on some discussion at Hacker News, I’m looking for a better deal). Don’t judge them by their website, fight through it and score the precious vector art and slap it on the backcover. You’ll need to use this ISBN # a lot the rest of the way, it’s the identity of your book.
4. Finding a printer Marie Mundaca was instrumental in all of these steps as a resource, but it was here that she really did breadpig a solid. She shopped around the various major printers (that is, the same printers who produce everything from Harry Potter to Malcolm Gladwell) and found the best rate for us — R.R. Donnelley. If you’ve ever produced your own mercy, this process isn’t very different. There are some things to know before you call:
Quantity
Paper stock If you don’t know anything about paper stock (and who does?) look at some books that are similar to yours and tell the printer. They want to help you out because, ultimately, they want your money.
Cover paper stock
Number of color pages (if you’re only doing a few colors pages, they have to be in sets of 8 and all clustered together, because they’ll get lonely otherwise).
5. Prototyping and approval
You’ll be able to order a few prototypes that they’ll run for you to approve. You’ll want to make sure the book itself feels and looks just the way you want it to. After this, we did all of our revisions digitally using the Insight online system our printer used. It’s a rather handy way to ’see’ every page as it’ll be printed and approve remotely.
6. Ta-da!
Once you approve, production will begin and can take anywhere from a couple weeks to a month. They’ll likely ask you for a desired print date, so be ambitious. This will depend entirely on the printer as bigger ones may have longer turnaround times (so much for economies of scale) because you’re not going to be very high on their todo list.
Fun-fact: it’s actually the book binding and glue-drying that takes the longest.
Either way, make some space in your living room (or give a heads up to your distribution center) and pour yourself a beer, or a tall glass of milk — you’ve created a book!
Epilogue
Sell, sell, sell! And make sure to come back here or tweet @breadpig to let us know how things turned out!
Like any good uncorporation, breadpig aims to do things a bit differently. Last year, we published a tutorial for how LOLMagnetz generated $30,000 in profits (for charity, but profits nonetheless). We donated $15,000 to the SF/SPCA that December of 08 and the rest went back into Breadpig, Inc. to purchase more inventory and fund our next project, the xkcd book, xkcd: volume 0.
Thanks to many of you who are reading this, the xkcd book has been (and continues to be) a great success!
From the 3-stop book tour alone, we raised enough to build “the xkcd school” in Laos; we’ll be visiting it in 2010 with a few books in hand to confuse the schoolchildren with. On top of that, in a little over three months of sales, Breadpig earned $53,000 in profits (all for Room To Read, of course). We’re coming up with some fun ways to let you, the breadpig legion, decide what literacy & education projects it’ll be used on. In the meantime, we’d like to show you exactly how we did it.
Before we begin, this tutorial – nay, this entire book – wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a few crucial people: Marie Mundaca, LeeAnn Suen, and Liz Nagle. At first, I had no idea what goes into producing a book — these 3 people were absolutely invaluable in bringing this project to fruition. They’re thanked on the copyleft page, too, but I’ll praise them at every opportunity I get. And our partners at Room To Read, chiefly Allison Rouse, have been incredibly supportive. This list wouldn’t also be complete without thanking everyone who helped pull off our book tour: the indefatigable Jenny 8. Lee, Craig Silverstein, Trevor Blackwell & the Anybots crew, Craig & Kirsten Nevill-Manning, team reddit, and all of you wonderful people who showed up, bought a book, or just told someone about it. (Thank you all!)
Reasons to self-publish books: (or start your own publishing company)
It’s not really that hard to create a quality product
Think of it like getting t-shirts printed; if you’re willing to put in the work to design & layout (or hire someone who can) you only need to find a printer and choose paper stock. The crucial element for success is having an established audience. Breadpig had very little to do with the success of the xkcd book, it’s thanks to Randall’s devoted fan base, which he’s deservedly built up over the years by delivering a high quality product (and ad-free!).
Ownership
If you’re the talent, you own it all — always and forever. Traditional (read: not breadpig) publisher typically want rights. Oh, and you get all the profits, too (as well as losses, tho). And if you’re starting your own publishing company, a la Breadpig, be prepared to strike deals that aren’t the same as traditional publishers. As an upstart, you can’t offer Barnes & Noble front table placement (so you know, that’s the prime location in a bookstore) and aren’t going to throw serious coin at advertising, so try a model that starts with the talent getting a majority of the profits.
You’re already “Internet famous”
Perhaps the most obvious reason to not go the traditional publishing route is because you already have a loyal fanbase. Bonus points if they’re already buying your merch to keep you out of a dayjob. This is absolutely the case with xkcd, so the best argument a traditional publisher can make — “lots of advertising & marketing experience and dollars to make your book a bestseller” — loses a lot of strength. The editorial experience can always be contracted; you’ve already done the marketing & PR departments jobs by growing a readership.
Reasons not to self-publish books
The industry isn’t exactly growing
OK, maybe you can go the e-book route now that Kindles and iPads will apparently be surrounding us during our morning commutes by this winter, but overall, this isn’t a super industry at the moment if you’re not publishing Twilight.
Books are heavy and take up lots of space
You’ll likely need to make your first order in mid thousands, which means a lot of dead tree in your fulfillment center / basement / livingroom if you can’t move it. You shouldn’t think twice about doing print on demand (quality has gotten really impressive) if you’re unsure about your audience. Profits are smaller, but there’s no risk. Have a huge hit and you can bootstrap your self-published sequel.
Thursday Dec 17th in Cambridge, MA is your last chance in 2009 to meet Randall Munroe for a book/poster/raptor-signing. It’s a free event, so please drop by.
Sales continue to grow for xkcd: volume 0 and the breadpig thought it was about time we gave thanks to all the kind readers who publicly reviewed the book. All of these great reviews no doubt helped spread the word.
XKCD VOLUME 0: THE SIGNING
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 26-100, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
We had an extremely successful book tour shortly after the release of xkcd: volume 0 that raised enough money to build breadpig’s xkcd school in Laos. And we’re grateful to all of you who showed up to support xkcd and this project.
But we didn’t make it to Boston/Cambridge, which is particularly ironic because xkcd lives there. Well, now’s your chance to meet Randall Munroe and pick up a special last minute autographed gift for someone special (or yourself, who, for all we know, is also special). Here’s the facebook event page if you’re into that sort of thing – we couldn’t have pulled this off without the help of the MIT Bookstore (first University bookstore to carry xkcd: volume 0), Berkman Center, and the folks behind ROFLCon (where you can see Randy again in April 2010).
After selling out (yay!) of the xkcd book, we had some printing delays over the last few weeks (sorry!) that have held up shipping for some of you. All books should have now been shipped, but if something seems very wrong, please forward your invoice to us.
“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” – Plato.
This school is a gift from the readers of XKCD, an internet comic strip. The world is full of exciting things to discover. We hope you find some of them.
Here are the latest photos from the school’s construction, it’s coming along quite nicely. Breadpig is hoping to visit in January.
Breadpig has a crush on @mental_floss, so when Mental Floss asked us to post this entry, we didn’t hesitate. Love makes you do things like that. On the brightside, it also means you have a chance to win a free copy of xkcd: volume 0.
These four songs all make brief appearances (in one way or another) on one, best-selling album. What are the four songs and what is the name of the album they appear on? When you have the answer(s), send them to AnotherAwesomeMFContest@gmail.com.
Sales of the xkcd book continue to be quite strong thanks to glowing reviews (thank you!). And the breadpig recently learned that we’d raised enough from our fundraising book tour to get the xkcd school built!
Now we need your help to dedicate it. You see, each school will have a permanent plaque installed with whatever Randall chooses. Leave your suggestions in the comments of his blag entry and we’ll report back to you later this week when xkcd chooses the final dedication.
We couldn’t have done it without you. We aimed to raise $32,000 for Room To Read to construct The Kengthan Incomplete Primary School in Laos (don’t be troubled about the ‘incomplete’ part, that’s just a tricky translation from Lao to describe the education level – it’s going to be 100% complete when it’s built). It wouldn’t be very helpful if we built a school that, for instance, were missing two walls.
Our fundraising events in New York and Silicon Valley alone brought in over $30,000 in generous donations from attendees, but we were pushed [well] over the top through book sales (all of our publisher profits are being donated to Room To Read). So even if you couldn’t attend, you helped by buying a book, and even if you didn’t buy a book, you helped by spreading the word, and if you didn’t do any of those things, that’s OK, too.
We’ll be looking for help to write the dedication plaque to be placed in the completed school next week, but in the meantime, we thought we’d share some photos from Laos. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, the xkcd school is in Salavan Province on Road No. 13 South. (Breadpig will be doing a site inspection next year once construction is complete).
Here is their current school.
Those aren’t skylights. The holes in the roof make rainy season rather challenging.
And here’s the xkcd school – already under construction!
So far so good.
It’s still missing a dedication plaque, but it won’t be much longer…
Thank you! I’m not sure if this would rank xkcd: volume 0 on the New York Times bestseller list, but we’re certainly pleased with your response to the book. Our events in New York, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley were all packed with eager xkcd fans and we hope you had as much fun at them as we did. Photos to come.
We’re still getting final numbers on how much money we’ve raised for Room to Read to build our xkcd school is Laos; in the meantime, here’s a photo of the first signing Randall ever did for a robot.
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