Leanpub for fiction authors
A great place to write your novel. Not the greatest place to sell it.
Leanpub is great for writing and producing a book, and that is as true of a novel as of anything else. But you will not earn much money selling fiction on Leanpub, and we would rather say so here than have you find out after you publish.
The sad truth
You will not earn much money selling fiction on Leanpub.
Leanpub is primarily a place where people come to buy technical books and business books. That is who shops in our store, and it is what they are looking for when they get here.
So if your plan is to publish a novel on Leanpub and have our readers find it and buy it, expect very few of them to. We are not being modest. Fiction readers are simply not looking here.
What Leanpub is good for, when the book is fiction, is everything that comes before the sale: writing it, and producing it.
What Leanpub is good for
Writing and producing your book.
The same tools technical and business authors use, which do not care what the book is about.
Write without fighting a word processor
Write in the browser in our Minimal, Visual or Source editor, and see the book take shape as you go. If the book is already written, upload the finished PDF and EPUB instead.
A real ebook with a click
Publishing produces a PDF, an EPUB and a web version of your book from the same manuscript, laid out for you.
Make it look like your book
Custom themes and print-ready PDF export come with a Light Author Membership or higher.
Share it while you write
Publish chapters as you finish them for the readers you already have. Each time you publish, they get the new version with a click.
It stays yours
You keep the copyright to your work. Leanpub does not claim ownership of what you write here.
Readers you bring are still readers
If you send your own readers to your book's page, they can buy it, and you earn the same royalty rate as every Leanpub author. Count on the readers you bring, not on ours.
Print-ready PDF export
Included with
Not included with
- Free Author Membership
- Mini Author Membership
A printable PDF, with the click of a button.
Getting a novel into print usually means laying the whole book out again for paper, which is a job in itself or something you pay someone else to do. On Leanpub you click a button. Print-ready PDF export turns the same manuscript that makes your ebook into a PDF made for printing.
Revise a chapter, click the button again, and you have a new one. That PDF is yours to take wherever paperbacks are sold, Amazon included: you can publish on Amazon yourself with it.
Publish on Amazon is a concierge service. We do the work of getting your book onto Amazon for you, to save you time. You do not need to use it.
It is also a very expensive service compared with just doing it yourself. If you have the time, export the print-ready PDF and publish it on Amazon on your own.
Royalty rate
80%
on every sale of $7.99 and up, and 80% minus 50 cents on purchases below $7.99.
Royalties
Great royalty rates. Not many royalties.
Leanpub's self-published authors earn 80% royalties on every sale of $7.99 and up, and 80% minus 50 cents on purchases below $7.99.
That is the same rate technical and business authors earn, and a membership never changes it.
But a royalty rate is a share of sales, and a novel will not make many sales here. Fiction readers are not really looking on Leanpub, so even at this rate you should not expect to earn very many royalties.
The sales you can count on are the ones you bring yourself. When your own readers buy your book on Leanpub, you keep most of what they pay.
Where next
If that is what you are after, start here.
Start free
A Free Author Membership costs nothing, which is the right price for finding out whether Leanpub suits how you write.
Selling where fiction readers shop
Publish on Amazon is our concierge service for putting a book on Amazon. Read its page for what it includes before you decide it fits a novel. Also, note that you can publish on Amazon yourself with our print-ready PDF export.
Write it here. Sell it where your readers are.
Use Leanpub to get the novel written and produced. Don't count on our store to sell many copies of it for you.
Create a book