Practice

If you’re a publisher , you may feel that the world has become a very different place. Instead of the warmth of paper, you’re confronted with the cold, unfamiliar reality of ebooks .

What if 75% of the revenue and 97% of the profit from the books you sell ends up coming from ebooks? How do you proceed? How do you succeed?

The answer may lie in the following thought experiment.

Imagine a world in which there were no minor leagues for sports.

Say the only time that people played sports were in elementary and high school and at the pro level—a world in which, once you’re 18, if you’re not a pro, you have nowhere to improve your skills and establish your reputation. (Pretend that universities decided to focus on education, or that they got scared of concussions or other liability risks, or that they got bored of all the revenue.)

Also, imagine that at the pro level, teams were compelled by their current collective bargaining agreements to maintain their rosters at roughly the same number of people as now, and to offer similar contracts as nowadays, but to relatively unproven talent.

How would pro teams proceed?

With great difficulty.

Sure, they would still get it right with some superstars, such as high-profile basketball (LeBron James , Kobe Bryant ) and football¹ (Wayne Rooney , Lionel Messi² ) players who made it clear to the world from a very early age that they were destined to perform at the highest level. And they would choose many of the same successes that established themselves later. But the percentage of successes would be a lot worse, and the corresponding percentage of expensive failures would be a lot higher. Professional sports is big business, and teams do everything they can to reduce risk. In baseball, hockey and football in particular, there is an elaborate progression of youth and minor leagues , so that talent can be assessed early, and the most talented young players developed. (In football, the transfer fees paid for top players justify the expense of the entire pyramid. It’s like a stock market crossed with a soap opera, and it’s almost more entertaining than some of the matches themselves.)

Similarly, publishers take steps to avoid risks. They use an author’s track record and the estimated target market of the book to judge the potential of the book and the likelihood of a successful outcome.

This could be taken much further. Earlier, we discussed O’Reilly’s Realtime Publishing program, which proposed to replace the $40,000 cost of producing a 500 page print book with a $4,000 cost of producing a 50-page ebook. However, there’s no reason that a 50-page ebook has to cost $4,000, or that a 500-page ebook or print book has to cost $40,000. After all, publishers should only spend meaningful amounts of money on ebooks or print books when there is an expected return on investment.

But how could this work?

Say instead of spending $4,000 up-front on ebooks, publishers created an equivalent of the minor leagues that sports teams used.

Pretend a new book project started like this:

1. Proposal accepted for publisher’s Lean Publishing program via a standard contract.
2. The author writes and publishes in-progress versions of his or her book on the publisher’s Lean Publishing site. An automated toolchain is used so that these versions are produced at essentially no cost to the publisher.
3. During this process, the author can have up to 3 hours of development editor time, for early guidance.
4. A completed manuscript is produced using this process.

At this point, the cost to the publisher isn’t $4,000. Instead, it should be doable for about $400.

So, the publisher can accept 10x as many books into this process, compared to a $4,000 per-book process—and 100x as many books compared to a $40,000 per-book process.

Also, most books should earn the publisher over $400 while part of this process even with relatively low sales: the margins on each ebook sale are essentially pure profit. (In this way, ebooks do resemble software, and publishers should very much want to become software companies!)

So, given this, publishers can essentially accept almost as many books into their Lean Publishing programs as they consider suitable: the Lean Publishing programs should be self-funding. Furthermore, there’s no reason that the books need to be 50 page ebooks. The manuscripts can be anything from 50 pages to hundreds of pages: the author is doing all the work, writing the book and engaging with a community of readers. Then, when the manuscripts are finished, the publishers can make educated bets on the best manuscripts and put them through the full editorial and production process, and invest additional marketing work behind them etc.

This can be done with considerably more information than publishers historically have had about a book. Here are some of things that the books coming out of this type of Lean Publishing process that you would be further investing in would have:

• a finished manuscript
• hundreds of readers
• buzz on social media (Twitter , Facebook , etc.)
• thousands of dollars in revenue
• growth in readership, revenue and buzz shortly before launch

In a word: traction .

This is the exact same thing that a Series A investor looks for from companies that have spent their seed round money building a product. You can be an incubator as well as being a publisher .

As a publisher, imagine if all the books you spent non-trivial amounts of money on publishing had all of the above going into your full publishing process.

Your job would be to take mildly (Flexible Rails ) or wildly (Fifty Shades of Grey ) successful books and make them more successful.

Sounds like a nice way forward, if you ask me.

Now, as a publisher or as an author, do you need to build all this yourself?

Thankfully, no.

Instead, you can use Leanpub to do the full Lean Publishing process. Everything from the writing process to the storefront just works. This is true whether you are an author or a publisher.

I’m the cofounder of Leanpub. We’re building Leanpub so that every author and publisher can use the Lean Publishing process without having to build all the machinery needed to do so. We see ourselves as building “Lean Publishing as a Service.” We’re putting our time and money where my mouth is . Leanpub is what I wish had existed when I was writing Flexible Rails.

We provide a lightweight, fully automated toolchain, to both self-published authors and to publishers looking to implement a Lean Publishing process.

We launched in 2010 as a free service for self-published authors. In 2012 , we launched our publisher program. This is also a free service. We’re a free writing workflow which is funded by our optional storefront . (But since the storefront is so good for Lean Publishing, people use it and we both make money.)

In 2013 , we’re launching our “white label” publisher program , so that publishers can use Leanpub for Lean Publishing completely under their own brand.

Here’s how Leanpub works:

1. Authors write in Markdown .
2. Authors save their work in a Dropbox folder.
3. Authors preview or publish PDF, EPUB and MOBI with one click.

This is entirely free.

Besides generating the ebooks in all 3 formats, we provide an attractive storefront.

This storefront features a variable pricing feature , with effective minimum and suggested price sliders.

We pay excellent royalties (85% per copy, so an author or publisher earns $8.50 on a $10 book, and $17.00 on a $20 book) and automatic update distribution .

Leanpub has evolved along with the ideas in this manifesto . When we launched, we were entirely focused on self-published authors; specifically, on technical book authors and bloggers . As we have grown, we have branched out into serial fiction, cookbooks, and anything else that our authors feel like trying on Leanpub.

At Leanpub, we encourage authors to launch a Minimum Viable Book and then iterate.

What’s a Minimum Viable Book? It’s the smallest in-progress subset of your book that you could sell and be able to claim with a straight face that it is worth money right now.

For a novel , why not publish in serial? Release the first few chapters . What worked for Mary Elizabeth Braddon can work for you.

For a technical book, once your book can save an advanced reader a couple of hours—which should be true after you have written a couple of chapters—you have written a Minimum Viable Book—if you can save an advanced reader two hours, your book will save a novice reader twenty hours . In both cases, the reader will have received excellent value for his or her money, as saving an expert two hours or a novice twenty hours should be worth a few hundred dollars in any technical profession.

Now, it’s up to you whether you price the book at what you think it will end up being worth when it’s done, or whether you price it at what you think it’s worth right now. There’s no right answer here, but you should indicate to readers what you are doing. At Leanpub, not only do we offer variable pricing, we also have an unconditional 45-day 100% refund policy ; we want your readers to be happy.

After publishing the first version of your book, the next step is to start marketing and selling your in-progress book . You need to blog and tweet about it. If it’s a programming book, getting it on the front page of Hacker News helps!

At this point, you should see some slow trickle of sales and followers.

Now comes the hard part!

Don’t think that when you’ve written a Minimum Viable Book that you are even close to being done your book.

If you really released the book early enough, you should have only spent about 10% of the total time you will end up spending on the book. Chances are it will have taken you at least 40 hours to write the Minimum Viable Book, meaning that you should expect to spend at least 400 hours to complete a first draft.

After you’ve released the first version, you need to stay focused and keep the stream of releases flowing. Thankfully, assuming you have some early readers, your early readers will be there to provide encouragement—or to nag you if you haven’t updated your book in two months!

Also, while you’re doing this, you also need to blog and tweet about your book, engage with your readers, etc.

Lean Publishing is hard work, not a Get Rich Quick scheme. Unlike much book writing today, however, it is also not a Get Poor Slow scheme.

If you are using the above process as a self-published author, you will have some decisions to make after your first draft is done:

Do you self-publish (and if so, ebook only, or also a print book?) or do you work with a publisher?

The fact that this is even a question shows how much the world has already changed.

If you decide to self-publish a print book, sites such as CreateSpace do a great job of taking a PDF (such as one produced by Leanpub ) and producing and selling it, providing order fulfillment and remitting your royalties. You should also stick your Leanpub ebooks in the Amazon KDP and Apple iTunes Connect storefronts for discoverability purposes. Amazon KDP is really easy to work with.

If you have built a strong following, however, you may have publishers fighting over you. After all, you will have already done the two hardest parts: finishing a book draft and building an audience. For a publisher, this means you are starting far ahead of other authors, so you have negotiating power. You should recognize that good publishers do add value to a book. If you have a completed manuscript, you can still get the benefit of much of this value. Things like copy editing, indexing and print book distribution and marketing are areas where publishers excel and authors especially benefit from their services.

Now, you can also use the above process on Leanpub as a publisher who is working with authors. Besides being the best way in the world for authors to self-publish in-progress ebooks, we have also added a publisher program, so that the full Leanpub toolchain is available for publishers to use. And in 2013, we’re building a “white label” version of this, so that your brand is prominent and the Leanpub brand essentially disappears.

The always-quotable Marc Andreessen recently stated that “software is eating the world.” We agree. But does this mean that every publisher needs to become a software company? We hope not. We want to provide the infrastructure, so that publishers can focus on what their core competencies: working with their authors to make the best books possible, produce really well-designed print books, and to market these books as best as possible. We feel that the ebook production process should be something that publishers, like authors, get for free as a by-product of how manuscripts are written. And rather than having to invent this process themselves, they can just use ours.

The process of helping build Leanpub, and seeing what our authors have done with it, has taught me some valuable lessons. Frankly, it has pushed my thinking farther than it could ever have grown in a vacuum—which is, of course, essentially the entire point of using a Lean approach . This book has evolved along with Leanpub. Like Leanpub, it has evolved from focusing exclusively on self-published authors, to focusing on any author or publisher who wishes to apply the Lean Publishing principles. And like this book, Leanpub has been in customer development for the past couple of years.

We have evolved Leanpub in a very Lean way, engaging with our early adopter authors, both on Twitter and in our excellent Leanpub Google Group . And as we expand Leanpub with our publisher program, we will again evolve it with feedback from our early adopter publishers.

If this sounds interesting to you, either as an author or publisher, please talk to us. My email is peter@leanpub.com. Or, you can email our whole company by emailing hello@leanpub.com.

Thanks very much for reading.