Email the Author
You can use this page to email Peter Armstrong and Len Epp about A Million Lessons.
About the Book
When Peter Armstrong and Scott Patten founded Leanpub in 2010, they had a clear purpose: to create the best way to write and publish in-progress ebooks.
By “the best”, they didn’t just intend to develop the best toolchain and workflow for authors and publishers. They also intended to actually help authors make money from their writing. Even if you were just a few chapters in, even if your target audience were limited to only a thousand or so other experts in your field, Leanpub was supposed to help you actually get paid for all the work you do, writing and marketing your book.
Recently, Leanpub passed the point where it has helped authors earn more than $1,000,000. This is an important milestone for any bootstrapped startup: for us, it is a proof of concept, validating the Lean Publishing philosophy.
It’s also a big moment for us in another, very special sense. We’ve only reached this milestone because of the feedback we’ve received from our “early adopter” authors. Leanpub was built on the principles of Customer Development, which means that Leanpub authors are not just users. They are also contributors to the development of Leanpub.
So, this book is both a commemoration of an important milestone for a startup, and a tribute to our hard-working (and very smart) authors. It consists of transcriptions from the Lean Publishing Podcast and selected responses to a recent Leanpub author survey. We hope you enjoy reading about our authors’ careers, their interests, and their experiences as pioneers at the frontier of 21st-century publishing.
Peter Armstrong, Scott Patten and Len Epp
December 19, 2013
About the Authors
Peter Armstrong is the founder and CEO of Leanpub. He has over two decades of experience in software, including eight years as a developer at Silicon Valley startups. He founded Ruboss in 2008, and launched Leanpub in 2010.
Peter coined the term Lean Publishing. 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.
Peter is the creator of Markua, the Markdown dialect used on Leanpub. He is the author of a number of books, including Lean Publishing, The Markua Manual and Programming for Kids. He has a BSc in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of Victoria, and he and his wife live in Victoria, BC.
Len is co-founder of Leanpub.