FAQ
Q. I have problems importing my blog, can you help?
A. Yes, we can! If you have any problems importing, please contact scott@leanpub.com and he’ll help you get your blog imported manually.
Q. What about marketing? Will Leanpub market my book?
A. Right now we don’t offer much help! The Shop page shows the top sellers, but this doesn’t help you if you’ve sold no books.
Now, over time, we’ll build the ability to browse books by category, etc, as well as facilitate the social discovery of your book by people who have purchased or liked similar books.
For now, however, think of Leanpub as a way of monetizing your existing blog subscribers or Twitter followers. These people are your audience, and a certain subset of them (our hypothesis is 1% – 5%) are looking for a way to give you money for content you have already written. Leanpub is the best way of enabling this to happen, since we make that content into a book for you…
Q. Most blogs are just electronic diaries; who, except maybe friends and family, would be interested in that?
A. That’s true: many blogs are of no interest to anyone but their creators. Most diaries fall into this category.
However, even diaries can be of interest if they are well-written. More generally, many blogs are really either collections of essays or contain 1 or more in-progress books in them. For example, Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters is a well-regarded book, which is a collection of essays which were originally published on his blog.
In the Leanpub example, both Startup Lessons Learned and Venture Hacks are good reading, even though they were produced with no editing by their authors at all. However, we don’t think that most Leanpub books will be produced with no editing.
Instead, we expect that authors will import their blogs as a starting point, and then go through the process of “curating” their posts: deleting the “I just had a great lunch” type of posts, and editing, rearranging and expanding others. At the end of this process, you have a manuscript. The great thing is that you get to sell as you go, and get real feedback from readers (as well as money)…
Q. What if I have posts in my blog that aren’t relevant?
A. You would just delete these posts entirely. We provide a handy application that lets you organize your book chapters in a faster way than the standard WordPress admin interface.
Q. What if a traditional publisher is interested in my Leanpub book?
A. At Leanpub you hold the copyright: you can self-publish it on Leanpub while you are shopping it around. (We also support PDF upload directly.) This way, if you get traction on Leanpub, this will help you build buzz and strengthen your negotiating hand with publishers. For example, you can ask to keep the e-book rights, since the Leanpub royalty percentage of 75% is much better than what most publishers offer.
Q. Do all Leanpub books need to start as WordPress blogs?
A. No! Any content that you own that has an RSS feed can be imported into Leanpub, and edited using our Leanpub book editor. This includes different blogging platforms (LiveJournal, Blogger, Typepad, etc) and microblogging platforms (Twitter, etc). Or, if you prefer (shudder) writing in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, you can just produce a PDF and upload that directly.
Q. What about photo books?
A. First, you need to own the copyright to the photos! Currently we give authors about 100MB of space on our servers, but we may offer a service in future where we provide more space for people who want to do gigantic photo books. Let us know.
Q. If I signed up with you, would I be free to have my finished book printed and sold, separately? I’d get my own ISBN as well as copyright.
A. Yes! Currently we recommend putting your Leanpub PDF on Lulu. See this book for an example of a Leanpub book on Lulu. We take precisely $0 of the revenue you make outside of Leanpub — whether that’s direct PDF sales, print sales, etc 
Q. How do you make your money?
A. We take the money from people who buy your book, and give you 75% of it. (Currently it’s paper cheques, mailed quarterly. Let us know if you’d prefer to get PayPal transfers monthly!) You can tell who bought your book: you see a list of names and email addresses etc on the Leanpub site.
Q. Can the ebook be read on iPad, Kindle, Sony and other readers?
A. Soon! (We have a primitive version of EPUB and MOBI cooked up, but we haven’t deployed it yet since we need to do more refinement and testing. Supporting Kindle, iPad, Sony etc is part of our strategy.)
Q. Sorry for all the questions!
A. Don’t apologize — thank you! We absolutely love customer questions and feedback. Peter puts his mobile phone number in the author application, so that anyone can call him and ask questions (12 hrs a day — 9 AM to 9 PM Pacific — 7 days a week). It’s how we know we’re building the right product!
