Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: When To Hit the Publish Button for the First Time
Since there are so many benefits to publishing your book chapter-by-chapter, as you write them, we encourage authors to publish their book for the first time after they have written their first one to three chapters.
Our motto at Leanpub is Publish Early, Publish Often.
Our self-publishing platform is built around the ability to easily publish your book in serial instalments, as you write it.
This has a powerful effect on the entire self-publishing process.
For example, it lets you start building an audience, even before your book is complete. It lets you change your outline for your remaining chapters, based on feedback. And it even enables you to easily fix mistakes or change what you've written and already published, if you've changed your mind, or something about the subject you're writing about has changed.
Whenever you add significant new content, like a new chapter, you publish a new version of your book, and everyone who already bought the book gets the update, which readers absolutely love; it's kind of a like new episode has come out for a TV series you're following.
(In fact, that's how serial novels worked in the nineteenth century: many of Charles Dickens' novels were published this way in magazines, with an eager public waiting breathlessly for the next chapter/episode to come out!)
Since there are so many benefits to publishing your book chapter-by-chapter, as you write them, we encourage authors to publish their book for the first time after they have written their first one to three chapters.
It's difficult to overstate the boost to morale and motivation you'll get from having early readers for your book.
And if no one buys it, that might be a good sign to pause your work on that project, and move on to your next idea.
The biggest obstacle anyone faces to becoming an author is holding yourself back, and one way people hold themselves back is by holding off publishing until your entire book is written.
Let it go - write your first chapter and hit the publish button!
You can get started writing a book any time here:
https://leanpub.com/create/book
We hope you hit the publish button for the first time yourself sometime soon!
