Leanpub FAQ

If this FAQ doesn't help, there are 2 other ways to get help...

Join the Leanpub authors Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/leanpub and post your question there.
Email us at hello@leanpub.com and we'll be happy to help you.

If your question is general in nature, please use the Google Group so that other Leanpub authors can benefit from your question being answered. We check the group too, so we'll see your question and reply there...

Q. I'm a Leanpub author, and even after reading all these FAQs I'm still stuck! Can you help?
Sure! Just email hello@leanpub.com and we'll be happy to help you. (This email address sends email to everyone at Leanpub, so the right person can reply.)

Q. I created an account and a book, found it in my Dropbox and I edited the Book.txt file. I then returned to the Leanpub website and generated a preview. However, the preview didn't have the contents of Book.txt that I just updated. What's up?
You need to write your actual content in separate Markdown files. The Book.txt file is just a list of files. See the sample content for each Leanpub book type at these links for business, fiction and technical books.

Q. Is there any Markdown editor that shows a preview of what the Markdown looks like?
On Mac there's Mou, and on Windows there's MarkdownPad. For programmers, we recommend writing in Emacs, vi or TextMate. For non-programmers, we recommend iA Writer for Mac and iPad. If all else fails, you can also use TextEdit on Mac or Notepad or Wordpad on Windows. Finally, there's an Adobe AIR app called Gonzo which should work on Mac and Windows. A Leanpub author has contributed a review of MarkdownPad and a review of Gonzo with an eye on their suitability for use writing Leanpub books.

Q. I tried to generate a preview of my book, and I waited a couple hours and nothing happened. Is there a delay?
Depending on the size of your book, there's about a 2 - 10 minute delay. Chances are if you don't see it in 10 minutes it didn't generate. We currently write a file called book_generation.log to the preview or published directories, which is primarily for our debugging. If you have any issue with this, please email hello@leanpub.com and attach the book_generation.log file.

Q. I accidentally renamed the Book.txt file to book.txt. Is there an issue?
Just rename it back to Book.txt and then there's no issue :)

I want to only import blog posts from the last 2 years, but the Leanpub import gets all my posts. How do I fix this?
Leanpub makes a separate file for each post it imports. So you can just delete the files you don't want from your Leanpub Dropbox folder, and remove them from the Boox.txt file. Or, if your blogging platform supports custom RSS feeds for categories or dates, you can make an RSS feed containing only the posts you want (by category, say) and then import that feed into Leanpub instead of your full feed.

Q. How do I use an image for my cover page?
Just put a file called title_page.png in your images directory, and that will get used. The file should be 1800 pixels wide by 2700 pixels high at 300 pixels per inch (PPI) resolution. Smaller files and resolution values work too (for example, 432x648 at 72 PPI), however these images will be scaled and may look fuzzy. So, for best results use 1800x2700 @ 300 PPI.

Q. How do I get the system to pick up my changes?
As soon as you save the files in the book folder, Dropbox will pick them up (assuming it is running) and the little Dropbox icon will look like a spinning thing. Once it's back to the green checkmark, Dropbox has the files. (Or, just wait about 10-20 seconds.) After this is true, clicking the publish button will trigger book generation with the latest files, since we always get the latest files from Dropbox.

Q. Can I delete my book? How?
As long as your book has no sales, you can delete your book. The button is is on the Sales page. If your book has sales, we have to offer it to its existing readers, so you currently can't delete it. In the future we will presumably add the ability to "archive" a book, so that it has no new sales but that its existing readers can still access it.

Q. Can the ebook be read on iPad, Kindle, Sony and other readers?
We support three formats: PDF, ePub (for iPad, Sony, Nook, etc.) and MOBI (for Kindle).

Q. I have problems importing my blog, can you help?
Yes, we can! If you have any problems importing, please email hello@leanpub.com and we'll help you get your blog imported manually.

Q. If I import my blog, are those files available in Dropbox?
Yes! They will show up there after the import is complete.

Q. I have co-authors. Is my inviting them to the Dropbox folder expected/appropriate from your perspective?
Yes. Note that we don't have full co-author support in the website, so it will still be you clicking the publish button, seeing the sales, etc. We plan to add proper co-author support in the next few months: the data model already supports it (see The Venture Hacks Bible, which has both Nivi and Naval as authors).

Q. What about marketing? Will Leanpub market my book?
Right now we don't offer much help! (We have a bestsellers page, but this won'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. What if a traditional publisher is interested in my Leanpub book?
At Leanpub you hold the copyright: you can self-publish it on Leanpub while you are shopping it around. 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 rate of 90% minus the 50 cent flat fee is much better than what most publishers offer!

Q. Is it possible and permissible to take the .mobi file and directly upload it to the Kindle Store under our own name?
Yes, you can do that! You don't need our permission, but you have our blessing! :)

We are planning to offer a service that makes it easier to do this, and we're planning to charge for it on a per-book basis. But even once we offer this service, you can just do it yourself for free since it's your work.

We're authors too, and the last thing an author wants is to feel like someone else owns their work or controls what they can do with it. It's yours. We're more than happy for you to make money in as many revenue streams as possible. As a courtesy to us, we would appreciate it if you left the mention of Leanpub in the second page (to help our marketing) when you sell it elsewhere, but you can remove that too if you want.

Our recommendation is to wait until the book is complete before putting it in the Kindle store and iBookstore, but you can do whatever you want. (Heck, you can even use Leanpub to make your book and put it in the Kindle store without ever selling it on Leanpub. However, from our perspective, it makes sense to also sell your books on Leanpub since we offer a better royalty structure as well as a nice mechanism to distribute updates to your in-progress books to your readers.

Q. What do you guys think about Amazon and Apple's bookstores? And what do you think about competitors that either charge a flat fee or take a cut to help to put books on the Amazon and Apple stores?
First off, we think that the Amazon and Apple bookstores are great, and that all finished books should be for sale in both stores. We're working on the ability to export Leanpub books directly to both stores, but today if you want to put a Leanpub book on either store you'll need to do it yourself or work with an "aggregator", which is a company that specializes in this.

We think this makes sense for finished books, but not for in-progress books. While a Leanpub book is in-progress, we feel it makes sense to only be sold on Leanpub, since that way your readers get automatic updates when you publish new versions, etc. If you're writing a book and publishing lots of versions of it while you're writing, the last thing you want to deal with is having to update your book in a bunch of storefronts every time you release a new version.

When a book is completed, we expect that enterprising authors will also want their books to be sold on the iBookstore and the Kindle store, since those storefronts get legitimate traffic. We don't see ourselves as competing with Amazon or Apple: both their storefronts are great places for finished books that target their respective platforms.

However, we don't think that this is necessarily true of the ather places that sell ebooks. While any Leanpub author is free to sell their Leanpub books wherever they want, we feel that storefronts other than Amazon or Apple don't produce much traffic themselves. (This is true of Leanpub too!) To promote your book, you need to do the work yourself, with blogging, Twitter, etc. To concentrate effort (and PageRank), it makes sense to point people at one storefront in your blog posts, tweets, etc. (We want that place to be Leanpub, obviously -- Amazon and Apple can take care of themselves :) Also, the reason we structured our royalties the way we do is so that you get a better deal with Leanpub, so you'll want to point at Leanpub so you make the most money from your marketing efforts!

Q. Do all Leanpub books need to start as blogs?
No! You can start from scratch, or from any content (that you own!) that has an RSS feed. Any content with an RSS feed can be imported into Leanpub. This includes different blogging platforms (LiveJournal, Blogger, Typepad, etc) and microblogging platforms (Twitter, etc). Or, you can start from scratch and write the entire book on Leanpub. If you import your RSS feed, what happens is that each RSS feed entry (blog post) turns into a file in your Dropbox folder.

Q. Most blogs are just electronic diaries; who, except maybe friends and family, would be interested in that?
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?
You would just delete these posts entirely by deleting the files from your Dropbox folder and removing their names from Book.txt.

Q. Will you offer an affiliate program?
Even better: we created a site called LeanBundle that lets you build your own deals out of Leanpub books and other digital goods, so you can earn money from your marketing efforts by creating your own bundles.

Q. What about photo books?
We don't add much value here. We recomend Lulu or similar services.

Q. Can I change the price of my book after creating it? For example, start cheap, grow the book based on feedback from readers, and increase its price as it's getting more valuable?
Yes, absolutely. You have complete control over the pricing, and we encourage new models of thinking about book development and pricing. This is exactly the model we think will work for many books. Publishing early to get early adopters for feedback and buzz is essential, and setting the price very low at the beginning helps this. You can change the price whenever you want in either direction, but we recommend starting low and increasing it over time so your early adopters don't feel taken. Also, we also support variable prices for books, so you can have a low (or free) minimum price, and a higher suggested price. Then as the book gains traction you can raise the minimum price and/or the suggested price.

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.
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?
We take the money from people who buy your book, and give you 90%, minus a 50 cent flat fee, of it. (Currently we do PayPal transfers quarterly.) You can tell how many people bought your book: you see a list of every sale (including the date purchased, the total paid and your royalty) on your book sales page.

Q. I didn't get my download link!
If you paid by eCheck with PayPal, it may take a few days for you to receive your download link, since that's how long it takes us to get notified by PayPal that the payment was received. So we recommend using either your PayPal balance or a credit card with PayPal. If there's any other issue, please email hello@leanpub.com and we'll fix it.

Q. Can I pay by eCheck with PayPal?
Yes. However, it may take a few days for you to receive your download link, since that's how long it takes us to get notified by PayPal that the payment was received. So we recommend using either your PayPal balance or a credit card with PayPal.

Q. I'd like to use Git and GitHub when I write my book, besides syncing with Dropbox. Do I have to write a script to only copy the content files into the Leanpub Dropbox folder?
No, it's even easier than that! We don't download any .git directories or .gitignore files from the folder you use with Dropbox, so your Leanpub Dropbox folder can just be a Git repository that you also push to GitHub! Whenever you click the publish button we just pull all the new stuff (ignoring .git, .gitignore and any other dot files) from Dropbox, and everything just works. This is the workflow that Peter Armstrong, Leanpub's co-founder, is doing with his Lean Publishing book, and it works fine.

Q. I'd like to use Leanpub to help an elderly parent create a book, but he's not computer savvy. Is this a good use of Leanpub? Is there anything you can do to help?
It's a great use of Leanpub. We're glad to help, but the good news is that we don't need to do anything special here. The following process will work for you:

Create a new Leanpub account & book for your father. You can use his email address for this.
Presumably he does not have a Dropbox account. Assuming this is true, when his email address gets the Dropbox sharing request from Leanpub, have him forward the email to you. You can either:
a) just accept the sharing request using your Dropbox account
b) accept the sharing request by creating a new Dropbox account for him, then send your Dropbox account a sharing request on his Dropbox folder
Regardless of how you did #2, you're good to go. You can edit his book on your computer using your Dropbox account. Whenever you want to publish a new version for him, just login as him and click publish.
Note that the book will sync with the Dropbox account that accepted the sharing request in #2, so you will see the generated books a bit faster if you just use your Dropbox account, since there won't be an extra Dropbox sync step through an intermediate Dropbox account.

If this doesn't make sense, please email hello@leanpub.com and we'll be glad to help.

I am using vim to write my Leanpub book and I'm having issues with code snippet markup. Can you help?
Switch to Emacs.

Just kidding!

A Leanpub author shared this:
I just want to share a little fix I made to the markdown syntax in order to make it working with the code markup that this wonderful service requires when you want to insert a snippet of code in your books.

Just create a markdown.vim file in your .vim/after/syntax dir and add the following lines:
syn match markdownLeanCode '^<<(.*)$'
hi def link markdownLeanCode markdownH1

Now your code snippets won't mess up with the official markdown syntax provided by Vim

Q. Sorry for all the questions!
Don't apologize -- thank you! We absolutely love customer questions and feedback. Please email any and all feedback to hello@leanpub.com. Everyone in our company reads the email sent to that address.