Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Getting Support from Leanpub

There are many ways to get support from Leanpub! In this post we’ll show you how, and explain a little bit about our self-publishing platform philosophy.

Where You Should Start

Ideally you just start here, creating a book, reading the introductory text, and previewing and publishing on your own, without ever needing to slow yourself down by relying on any Leanpub support:

https://leanpub.com/create/book

But publishing a book and discovering features is complicated!

So, when you create a book, there will be a Help section you can access in the menu at the top right of the page.

This section will have lots of helpful links to our Author Support Guidelines, the Author Help Center, Quick Walkthroughs for Getting Started on a Leanpub Book (including a full screenshot-by-screenshot tutorial for the writing mode you chose when you created your book), and the Leanpub Authors Forum.

The Author Support Guidelines

Reading our Author Support Guidelines might be the most important five minutes you spend in your self-publishing work. It can save you countless hours by laying out the landscape for you, essentially, so you don’t need to chart your path with no guidance.

The Author Help Center

Our Author Help Center has over one thousand detailed articles written in response to author feedback and questions over the years.

There, you can get instant answers to every question a Leanpub author has asked us about in the past.

If You Can’t Find an Answer Yourself

If you’ve read the Author Support Guidelines and searched Author Help Center and the Leanpub Authors Forum and you haven’t been able to find an instant answer, please email our team at hello@leanpub.com.

Our answer may actually be a brand new Help Center article that we write based on your feedback!

How To Save Your Time and Be Most Effective

Here’s a basic fact for all practical human communication:

You can save a lot of time in end if you put some more time in up front.

So, when you contact Leanpub support, to save yourself a lot of time by helping us help you more efficiently, please include the following:

• If you’re emailing us, please do so from the same email address you use for your Leanpub account. Not only will this help us find your account easier, but it will also let us talk to you about your account. We treat reader and author privacy very seriously.
• Please include a link to each relevant book or course. We get lots of questions, and some authors have lots of books and courses, so if your email points us exactly where to look, this is helpful.
• Try to describe the issue as precisely as possible (but we’ll understand if you don’t have a PhD in Leanpub yet!). For example, if you are seeing an error message somewhere, please tell (or, better, show) the team the error message you’re seeing, and where and when you’re seeing it. Speaking of showing us information…
• Screenshots are hugely helpful! If you are seeing something that does not look right to you, please try to take a screenshot of what you’re seeing, and include it in your communication with us.
• If you are having a particular problem with the contents of your book or course, please point us to the specific part of the specific file, where you think the problem is located.