What Are Leanpub’s Top Recommendations for Promoting Self-Published Books?

There are lots of ways to market self-published books!

A quick web search will yields thousands of results. If you’re new to self-publishing, we recommend you start by following reputable organizations and bloggers in this space, such as the Alliance of Independent Authors.

In this brief article, we’re just going to present some of the top, easy-to-do options available to you if you have published your book on the Leanpub bookstore.

The most important thing to do is to sign up for our discount promotions:

http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/802929-opt-in-to-leanpub-discount-promotions-to-let-leanpub-promote-your-book-course-or-bundle-at-a-discount-and-help-increase-your-sales

To see how they work, we recommend you sign up for our weekly and monthly newsletter sales:

https://leanpub.com/newsletters

The main promotional tactic we advise people to do is to use our coupons feature to hold periodic discount sales on Twitter and elsewhere, e.g. “Click this link today to get this book for 40% off!”. Here are the instructions for making coupons for Leanpub books:

http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/640826-can-i-create-coupons-for-my-books-bundles-or-courses-to-give-them-away-for-free-or-at-a-discount-as-part-of-a-promotion

You can also buy a Sponsored Deal spot in our newsletters, and a spot on The Shelf:

http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/5196744-i-m-thinking-of-buying-a-spot-on-the-shelf-how-many-users-does-leanpub-get-how-much-traffic-the-leanpub-homepage-get-how-many-subscribers-do-the-newsletters-get

You can use unpaid royalties from your book’s sales to buy these spots, so hopefully your book promotions can be self-funded, setting up a virtuous cycle of increased sales.

The next most important thing we can recommend is to ask other authors what they have done to promote their books, which you can do on our Authors Forum here:

https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors

If you have any ideas of your own, or you want to share the details of a successful (or unsuccessful!) book promotion experiment you’ve run, please feel free to post about them there!

Finally, for a much longer explanation of how you can use Leanpub to promote your self-published book and hopefully increase your sales, please see the following article:

http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/1587118-tips-for-self-publishing-and-selling-books-using-leanpub