How does Leanpub compare with Gumroad?
Leanpub and Gumroad are both places where you can sell ebooks.
How do they compare?
Gumroad
Gumroad is a great place to sell arbitrary digital goods, including ebooks.
Leanpub
Leanpub is the best way to write, publish and sell ebooks and online courses based on Markdown.
People who come to Leanpub are looking specifically for ebooks and online courses.
On Leanpub, the audience is therefore focused on particular digital products, which can be an advantage in your ebook being discovered there.
However, Gumroad has more products, and so that may increase your discoverability too: people looking for something else might find your book and decide to buy it instead.
How is Leanpub Different from Gumroad?
- Leanpub has an robust and unique book production workflow. You're not just essentially filling in blog post forms to create a book, not that there's anything wrong with that! On Leanpub, you can write in Markua, our "Markdown for Books", either in our in-browser editor, or syncing with GitHub or Dropbox. You can then click a single button to produce an ebook in PDF, EPUB, and web formats.
- Leanpub has variable pricing, where you set a minimum and suggested price, and customers choose what to pay.
- Leanpub has a very smooth process for selling in-progress ebooks, complete with automatic updates, etc.
- Leanpub sends a weekly sale newsletter to over 40,000 readers, and a monthly sale newsletter to over 80,000 readers. Due to Leanpub's large number of computer programming and other technical books, many of these readers are highly technical. Our authors have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties just from our newsletter sales.
- Leanpub can also produce an online course from a Markdown manuscript.
- Leanpub pays an 80% royalty rate to you for every sale. The percentage paid to you per sale is higher on Gumroad, but the trade-off is that you don't have Leanpub's many book-specific features etc.
How can I use Leanpub and Gumroad together?
You can use Leanpub to produce an ebook, and you can sell that ebook on Gumroad as well as (or instead of) on Leanpub.
However, if you're already selling en ebook on Gumroad, there's no reason not to also sell on Leanpub, especially when your book is in-progress!
