2/8: Randall Munroe of XKCD at Borderlands Books, San Francisco, 2009 09 23 Part 2
Randall Munroe on a book tour, with a surprise appearance at Borderlands, talking about his self-publishing process. This is a summary, not a transcript. =-=-= At first, he had someone who knew about layouts to design the book. After watching that process, though, he decided it was time to take control. He read through the whole archives, and then remembered the title text. So he read through it again, this time with title text. He selected his favorites. He didn't do up the book the proper way, but this is how he did it: a Photoshop file for each page, shuffled the comics around, and wrote the commentary. The style for the commentary was inspired by 7 Years of Highly Defective People, where Scott Adams has red marginal notes about the comics. Randall took a stack of paper, made his commentary, scanned it, colored it red, and put it in. He sent off the PhotoShop files to someone, they put it together in a .pdf, and it got printed. He first actually saw the book when it was being shipped to the bookstores. He found things in the book that bug him: there is a section missing from a panel on page 10100; a traditional publisher's quality control might have spotted this. The page numbers are a special thing that he put some effort into: at first you think they're binary, then you see a 2 and think it might be ternary; then you check; a functional programmer in the audience who are obsessed with proving things; they might figure it out. (I swing the camera to Tupshin.) Question period is opened.
Randall Munroe on a book tour, with a surprise appearance at Borderlands, talking about his self-publishing process. This is a summary, not a transcript. =-=-= At first, he had someone who knew about layouts to design the book. After watching that process, though, he decided it was time to take control. He read through the whole archives, and then remembered the title text. So he read through it again, this time with title text. He selected his favorites. He didn't do up the book the proper way, but this is how he did it: a Photoshop file for each page, shuffled the comics around, and wrote the commentary. The style for the commentary was inspired by 7 Years of Highly Defective People, where Scott Adams has red marginal notes about the comics. Randall took a stack of paper, made his commentary, scanned it, colored it red, and put it in. He sent off the PhotoShop files to someone, they put it together in a .pdf, and it got printed. He first actually saw the book when it was being shipped to the bookstores. He found things in the book that bug him: there is a section missing from a panel on page 10100; a traditional publisher's quality control might have spotted this. The page numbers are a special thing that he put some effort into: at first you think they're binary, then you see a 2 and think it might be ternary; then you check; a functional programmer in the audience who are obsessed with proving things; they might figure it out. (I swing the camera to Tupshin.) Question period is opened.