So at last a xkcd book is out. Signed copy costs $10USD more than an unsigned one — my guess is Randall’s gonna make more off that than the books! *does maths* Sign­ing 6 books/minute is $3600/hour… not bad for a dude with a pen & a blag.

It’s only going to run for 24 hours, so real­is­ti­cally that par­tic­u­lar activ­ity would max out at $86,400 — but that’s pure profit, because there’s already a profit built into book sales. That’s assum­ing rel­a­tively mod­est sales of 8640 units — for a web­site with a reach peak­ing at just over 0.1% of the Internet’s daily users, I’m not sure if this is real­is­tic or not. Still, Alexa reck­ons it’s the 1735th most pop­u­lar web­site on the planet, so that’s got to count for something.

Oh, and remem­ber it’s inde­pen­dantly pub­lished with roy­al­ties split between Munroe and the phil­an­thropic backer — so, guess­ing it’s ~200 pages, and an ini­tial run of 10,000, even an unCor­po­ra­tion like bread­pig ought to be able to make, if you’ll par­don the pun, some dough (groan) from the $18 list price.

At any rate, Munroe stands to make dra­mat­i­cally more from the mun­dane activ­ity of book sign­ing than pos­si­bly any other car­toon­ist in his­tory. The moral of the story is do some­thing you love, so long as it’s got tremen­dous mer­chan­dis­ing potential ;-)

Tags: blag, book signing, merchandising, publishing, uncorporation, xkcd