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).

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!

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.

So, you’re ready to start. And this entry is ready to end (Click here for Part II: the step by step guide to publishing a book).

I aspire to be a man of my word, so if you’re attending PyCon this year, be on the lookout for the breadpig booth (a very nice perk of “Silver Level” sponsorship, I might add) where we’ll be selling xkcd: volume 0. (Don’t worry, if you’re at a Python convention, yet don’t already have a copy, we won’t tell — plus, you’re saving on shipping costs, which is prudent).

Breadpig is proud to be sponsoring PyCon, especially given all that the language and community have done for reddit (open-source, btw!). Donating $3K to this foundation is just a small way of saying thanks.

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.

• Legal Nomads
• Doomkopf
• BoingBoing
• xkcd sucks (yes, it was a positive review)
• PBS
• Comics Alliance
• LATimes
• Mental Floss
• ArsTechnica
• FranZone
• Richmond Magazine
• PopMatters

If we missed your review – let us know!

And here’s a bonus review from Barklund.org, who explained the unique page-numbering system.

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).

Anyway, now on to the hypocrisy: If you are interested in buying something commercial, maybe something a little unique, there’s quite a few great candidates at the breadpig store. And we hear LOLmagnetz have been another big hit on ThinkGeek this year. Lastly, there’s always xkcd: volume 0, which ought to be on every self-respecting geek’s wishlist.

While we support (and frankly, are awed by) your choice to Buy Nothing this holiday season, if you do want to buy something this year, consider breadpig – because it’ll be doing more than just commercialism. Happy holidays!

After getting your feedback on the xkcd blag, Randall chose the following dedication to be inscribed on the plaque at the entrance of the xkcd school in Laos; we think it turned out quite well:

“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.

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.