Publish in 5 Minutes!

With Leanpub, you can become a published author in 5 minutes, not 5 months or 5 years. Leanpub refers to the concept of Lean Publishing, which applies the principles of Lean Startups and Customer Development to the process of writing a book. We believe authors should publish early, publish often and listen to their readers -- and we're building Leanpub to help them do this. Successful bloggers understand this, which is why we're building Leanpub on the most successful blogging platform: WordPress.

75% Royalty!

That's not a typo. If you sell your ebook on Leanpub for $20, you get $15. That's more than 7 TIMES the $2 that you'd typically get from a publisher who sold a $40 print book. (Typically, an author royalty is 10% of the publisher's revenue, which is 50% of the price. So, 50% of $40 is $20, meaning you'd get $2.) This is why we think that Lean Publishing of Ebooks is the future.

FREE to Join and Use

We make our money by taking our 25% cut of the sale price of your ebooks. (We pay the PayPal fees, so this works out to about 20% profit for us.) So, there is no risk for you: we only make money if you do. Also, the entire point of Leanpub is to sell Ebooks, and especially in-progress Ebooks. Unlike our competitors, Ebooks aren't an afterthought after print books, T-Shirts and coffee mugs: selling Ebooks is our entire business. So, we're going to become the best in the world at doing this.

Featured Leanpub Book:
Startup Lessons Learned

Startup Lessons Learned is a 630 page PDF book of the entire Startup Lessons Learned blog (from August 2008 to now), that we've produced with Eric Ries of Startup Lessons Learned.

We're automatically updating the book with the latest Startup Lessons Learned posts every couple of weeks, and existing purchasers automatically get free updates. It's absolutely the best way to catch up on years of Eric's wisdom, and at $29.99 it's a steal!

We're also offering "seasons" of the Startup Lessons Learned blog. Currently there are two seasons: Season One (Sept. 2008 - Sept. 2009) and Season Two (Sept. 2009 - present). Season One is complete, and Season Two will be complete in September 2010.

Together, these "seasons" contain the same content as in the All Seasons book, but are $19 each instead of $29.99. We're trying both the "All Seasons" approach and the individual seasons approaches since we believe in doing customer development for books.

(How big can a PDF get before it's too big? Is there a market for Season One of a blog, for the newer readers of a blog who have read the newer posts already? These are questions that it helps to get real data to answer...)

Use Leanpub to Publish and Sell Your Book While You're Writing It

The most important thing a writer wants when writing a book is feedback. Historically, that's what family, friends and editors have provided. At Leanpub, we enable self-published authors to get access to an even more important kind of feedback: feedback from readers of your book, while you're writing it.

Your partner or your friends might be too nice, or too busy, to provide the attention and constructive criticism you really need when writing a book -- whether it's a cookbook, a technical book or even a novel.

However, the one type of person that will give you feedback is a reader who has paid his or her own money for your book. That person has made an investment in you, and wants the best book possible, so if something is confusing, wrong (or fantastic!), that person will let you know.

The ability to publish and sell an in-progress, self-published book is unique to Leanpub, since we make book updates easy to automatically distribute to all your existing readers. This lets your readers give you the kind of feedback that every author wants--even superior to the feedback provided by most traditional publishers. This is true for technical books (how many development editors compile and run your code?), but also true for cookbooks (how many development editors will cook your recipes?).

Sound good? Sign Up Now!

Follow Leanpub on Twitter

If you want the latest updates, you should follow Leanpub on Twitter.

You can also follow Leanpub's founders, Peter Armstrong and Scott Patten, on Twitter. Or you can email Peter or Scott.

Finally, Peter and Scott's consulting company is called Ruboss. We're bootstrapping Leanpub by doing RIA and web development and consulting using technologies which include Adobe Flex, Ruby on Rails, Erlang, JavaScript, Google Gears and HTML 5.

Featured Leanpub Book:
The Venture Hacks Bible

The Venture Hacks Blog: Good advice for startups. 31,000 subscribers and growing.

The Venture Hacks Bible: 1000 pages, and growing. PDF. Constantly updated. $19.

When you buy Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant's The Venture Hacks Bible, you get a PDF of the entire Venture Hacks blog. It's currently 1000 pages, and it's growing since we're constantly updating the PDF. You can read all those posts freely online right now; however, it's more pleasant to read them as a PDF.

New PDF versions will be produced every month, and previous purchasers will automatically be sent download links when the book is updated...

Reviews of The Venture Hacks Bible
“My feedback is that as a founder in the trenches, no question all 908 pages will get read, referenced, covered in tears, and slept on 1000 times over. Now i dont have to bust the laptop at SFO. Fired up on just about everything you guys have going on.”
– Josh Vickers, Founder, Task Squid

Venture Hacks
“Excellent stuff!”
– Evan Williams, Founder of Blogger and Twitter

“A fantastic blog… I heartily suggest entrepreneurs thinking about taking venture money read it.”
– James Hong, Founder of Hot or Not

“Smart entrepreneurs continuing to add to the demystification of the term sheet.”
– Brad Feld, Managing Director at Foundry Group