Leanpub has my first e-book

lifeI did publish my first e-book yesterday in Leanpub.

The book is heavily based on my blog posts and it introduces the idea of Daily Productivity Habit, which you have hopefully seen here already.

Leanpub is a bit unknown book publishing platform that allows anyone to publish e-books with ease.

In Leanpub you can publish the book even if it is not ready. If someone buys the book that is not finished, he is entitled to receive all the updates to the book with the same price for FREE.

That way you can develop your book and sell it during the writing process to anyone interested, or you can use it to have a book that is constantly growing, improving or otherwise getting better.

In settings of the book you can estimate how ready is your book and the estimated figure is published to the Public page of the book.

Publishing books under development gives possibilities. You can build your book based on your blog posts or even import your blog directly to Leanpub. The service can import your blog and convert it to markdown files, the format supported by it.

Leanpub has tight and mandatory integration with Dropbox. The author writes the book to specific structure in Dropbox and the book creation is triggered through the web service. The service connects to Dropbox and fetches sources of the book and publishes the book and previews of the book to the same structure. The book is always available in three formats PDF, EPUB and MOBI.

Leanpub books have few, but not many, customisation options. You can choose different paper sizes for your book based on the category. You can add cover image etc. or choose how the links from your book will look like.

In purchase options you can set the minimum and suggested prices for the book. The buyer can choose the amount he pays above the minimum price. He can pay more than recommended price if he wants.

Purchasing also supports coupons which you can give. Coupons can be limited to be used certain amount of times.

The service takes the share of the sales you sell through site, but it has no ownership of your creations. You are free to publish your book to any other place. You are the owner of your work.

Some authors have made significant amount of money with Leanpub. The best books have sold thousands of copies with price of 30 dollars.

But It wont be easy. Leanpub has 45 days 100% money back guarantee. If the readers wont like what they read, they can ask refund.

..

I have owned Leanpub account already few years. I have started few books, which never got finished and decided to drop them. You can delete the books as long as you have not sold them. When you sell them, you can’t drop them anymore.

In general Leanpub is easy.

It is easy to create a book, if you have Dropbox account. Anyone can learn markdown, since most of it is just plain text. After you learn how the book is structured, everything is easy.

Once I was trying out writing with iPad and character encoding caused error in book creation. I received email from support where they said they noticed the error and it was a bug.  After few days  it was fixed.

I felt it was excellent service.

And my book. You can find it from here:

  • Todd Lohenry

    Thanks for sharing this! I’ll be following your blog in feedly; mine is at https://business.toddlohenry.com; we both chose the same font/approach for our design… 😀

    • https://www.betterproductivityblog.com/ Rami Rantala

      Thanks. Nice to know there are feedly followers as well 😉

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