On Leanpub, you can publish your book while you write it, and earn 80% royalties.

We call this Lean Publishing, and it's why Leanpub exists. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress book using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do. You can learn more about Lean Publishing in The Lean Publishing Manifesto, or watch the Tools of Change conference talk about it. There's even a book about these ideas, which still guide us today.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to preview or publish your ebook, just click a button. On Leanpub, you can write in Markdown and generate your ebook with one click. (Markdown is really easy: everything you need to know is in the template we set up for you when you create a new book.)

Now, if you have completed a book already or if you have a writing workflow you prefer, you can also just upload your own PDF or EPUB files and click a button to publish them.

Whether you're writing in Markdown or uploading PDF and EPUB files, Leanpub is the best place to write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks, with coupons, variable pricing, bundles and more. Besides how easy we make everything and the excellent support we provide, the other reason authors love Leanpub is our 80% royalty rate.

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98.

You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale.

So, if we sell 5000 copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000. Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub. In fact, authors have earned over $13 million USD writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Finally, Leanpub also supports publishing online courses, using the same Lean Publishing approach and Markdown-based workflow that we use for ebooks, and paying the same 80% royalties! To learn more, just create a course: the new course will contain a template which shows you how to get started.

Leanpub makes AI translation accessible to everyone! All you need is a completed book manuscript, written in either Microsoft Word or Markdown.

For books written in Microsoft Word, we now have full-serve and self-serve options.

The full-serve option is our new TranslateWord service. This is a concierge service, where you upload your manuscript in one or more Word documents, and Leanpub does all the work for you! We import your manuscript into Leanpub, preview it to ensure it looks good as an ebook, and then use our AI translation services to translate it into the languages you choose. You own the translations, and you have all the control. You can sell your translations wherever you want, like on Leanpub and Amazon. Learn more about TranslateWord here.

The self-serve option is to create a new book in Browser mode, and then import your Word document into Leanpub. Leanpub books are written in Markdown, so after you import your Word document, you'll need to do some cleanup and editing, and preview your book to ensure it looks nice. But once you've done that, you can use our fully-automated AI translation services for Markdown books, which are cheaper than our TranslateWord service.

To translate your Markdown book into up to 31 languages, you choose our TranslateAI service. TranslateAI uses GPT-4o (the best AI model in ChatGPT) and our custom prompt engineering to provide high-quality translations into up to of 31 languages. We also have an amazing GlobalAuthor bundle, which translates your book into either 8 languages or 31 languages!

Leanpub does a lot to promote authors and their books. We constantly promote books on social media, especially new releases and bestsellers. We create short videos to help promote selected new books, and you can apply to have us record and produce a book launch video with you - for free. Leanpub co-founder Len Epp also records in-depth long-form interviews with select authors for our Frontmatter podcast, and we provide you with a range of marketing tools, from custom coupons to affordably-priced sponsored spots in our Weekly and Monthly newsletter sales.

Leanpub reader memberships support Leanpub authors and Leanpub!

Leanpub is a platform where authors self-publish ebooks and online courses. We're a bootstrapped startup, and we launched in 2010.

Leanpub Reader Memberships are a great deal. They give you you free access to about 2000 books on Leanpub that are only free with membership. This includes hundreds of books about computer programming, data science, software architecture and more!

Besides being a great deal, Reader Memberships support Leanpub authors! Specifically, 50% of the money from Reader Memberships is paid as royalties to Leanpub authors.