Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Setting Up Multiple-Copy Team Discounts for Sale to Team Leads and Companies

Many Leanpub books are the kind of professional non-fiction books that people buy to learn something they need to learn for their job, or as part of leading a team, or while building their company.

That means many Leanpub books are the kind of books entire teams of people working together should read, so they are all on the same page (sorry) and at a shared level of understanding.

Believe it or not, most ebook platforms do not have a way for people to buy multiple copies of an ebook and distribute those copies to individuals on their team.

Besides the complexity involved, and the rather infamously low technical skill that bookstores bring to their platforms, we’re not sure why Leanpub might be the only online bookstore with this feature: it was pulled out of us by our authors, who had customers asking them for it.

Now, while it is easy to buy multiple copies of an ebook (or online course) on Leanpub, most people expect discounts when they buy in bulk.

Since Leanpub customers choose what to pay, they can sort of achieve this on their own, by choosing the Minimum Price of a book when they are buying multiple copies of a book, instead of the Suggested Price. (What they pay in the end is the price they choose times the number of copies they want to buy, just to be clear!)

We realized that even better than having this kind of self-serve bulk purchase feature, was to make a nice-looking Team Discounts feature for authors, that would be displayed on their book’s landing page.

You can learn how to set up a Team Discounts section on your book’s landing page in this article.

It just takes a couple of minutes to set up your book’s Team Discounts, and it gives you a great way to boost sales, especially if you’re talking to people who lead teams or might have a company training budget!