How much does xkcd make

If you earn the minimum wage, you make a penny every 5 seconds during work hours, or every 20 seconds if you average it over your whole week. Someone making minimum wage in pennies would earn about 30 lbs of pennies per workday. Two weeks' worth of pay in pennies would fill a small carry-on suitcase. At lbs, the suitcase would probably be too heavy to pick up. However, if they were paid in quarters instead of pennies, two weeks' pay would only weigh about 3 lbs. If paid in a typical mix of loose change, [1] The makeup of a "mix of loose change" depends on your spending habits.

Lots of people have calculated this to estimate the amounts of change in a jar. One of the more careful theoretical calculation I've seen, which considers prices and sales tax, comes from Dan Kozikowski. Assuming an 8-hour workday, that's pennies per second.

If paid in a mix of loose change, the CEO would earn about a water bottle of coins per minute, and a duffel bag full of loose change every hour, or water bottles per workday:. I learned very early on in life that not everyone wants to hear every fact in the world, even if you want to tell them everything you've ever read.

Which is why it's probably good that I have the comic schedule that I do -- because I would figure out something to say every 30 minutes if I were forced to by my schedule. But it would not be the most interesting. How does the weekly schedule of xkcd and What If play into that? Is it a way of forcing yourself to create with regularity? If there's one thing I've learned from drawing xkcd, it's that I need a strict schedule.

Some people who publish comics will just write whenever they have a good idea and put things up, without a regular update schedule. If I did that, I would never post anything. I have to have that deadline pressure to make me pick something. And that was part of why I hesitated with the question-answering site, and part of why I picked it out of all the things I could have done a blog about -- because I knew that the questions were going to make me want to answer them anyway.

What about your work environment? Where do you actually do your research and your drawing? For a long time, I was working from home. Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn't my house is mentally helpful: "This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts," and "over there is the place where I do the dishes. There are a lot of people who have written books about creativity that I haven't read, so I'm not by any means an expert on it, but my impression is that being creative is just a combination of getting new stimulus, but also having periods where you're not getting any stimulus.

I had to stop reading Reddit sometime a few years ago, because I found that whenever I'd bump into a problem that was going to take a little time to solve, I'd just switch over and refresh Reddit and distract myself. Depriving myself of that has definitely been an important part of actually getting anything done, ever.

But at the same time, if you're just staring at your room with no Internet or no connection, you just go crazy and don't have anything to give you any ideas at all.

Comics, once they start touring, all their jokes are about airplanes. So that's something I try to remember: Don't do all of your jokes about running a website.

But the jokes -- not just visually, but in tone -- feel consistent at the same time. I was going to ask you how the comic has evolved, but I guess the better question is: Has it evolved? Or would you say it's kept a steadiness throughout the years?

I don't know. I try not to spend too much time interpreting my comics for people, because I try to put out there whatever I can, and people can draw whatever conclusions they want. And if they like something and laugh, it affects how I think about it -- and maybe I do more of those, and understand what sort of jokes make people laugh, and so on. The one thing that I didn't anticipate at the beginning was how much fun I had doing infographics.

I think the things I've had the most fun creating -- and that have been the most invigorating and rewarding -- have been things like the chart of the movement all the characters in Lord of the Rings.

That was one of those things where I'd always thought, "You know, it'd be so cool if someone could make that and see what that looked like. And last year, I did a chart of money and all these different amounts of money and all the different amounts of money in the world and how they compare to each other.

It was about a month and a half of sixteen-hour days of research. I had easily ten times as many academic journal articles and sources on that one comic than on anything I did in the course of my physics degree.

And the comic was so large, it wound up being a huge, sprawling grid. It was sort of disorganized -- I was going for this "Where's Waldo? We printed up a version that was normal poster size, 24 x 36 inches, and then we got a billboard printer to make a double size version that was like six feet high, just so you could read all the little text. That was a fun one. I don't really know about the "what is and what isn't a comic? I think it was comic , which I know because we had to do a lot of custom work for that comic to make it so people could drag and scroll and zoom in on it -- because there was no way that we could fit the whole thing on one screen.

So I remember the number from having to load it up and test features to it. A lot of people will refer to comics by number to me, and I'll realize they're expecting me to remember all the comics by number.

And I can't even remember what I ate this morning, let alone which comic was ! What will also happen is that I'll have a joke that I'll make to friends, and then eventually I'll think, "Hey, that could be good as a comic. I'm not being pretentious, just forgetful! I'm just one of those people who can always tell the same story twice, forgetting that I've told it already. So, given the challenges of creating fresh content -- and I know you get this all the time, but I have to ask -- how do you actually come up with new ideas?

Especially over such a long stretch of time? I think, if anything, it's noticing the things that make me laugh and grabbing onto them and figuring out how to write them down. There are definitely times -- and I think this is pretty common among cartoonists -- where you spend an entire day trying to think of an idea, and you're like, "I give up.

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