The 5 Writing Modes of Leanpub
There are 5 different writing modes on Leanpub:
- Leanpub In-Browser Text Editor
- Dropbox
- GitHub
- Bitbucket
- Bring Your Own Book
In the first four writing modes, you write in plain text. This plain text can be formatted in either Leanpub Flavoured Markdown (LFM) or Markua. Both of these are dialects of Markdown, which was created as a way for bloggers to easily write blog posts. (Markdown is easier to write than HTML.)
In the last writing mode, Bring Your Own Book, you don’t write in plain text, so you don’t write in either Leanpub Flavoured Markdown or Markua. Instead, you write your book any way you like (such as using Word, Pages, or LaTeX), and then you just upload PDF, EPUB, and MOBI files that you produce using your tools. (You can also choose to upload any one or two of these formats - you don’t need all three.)
So, if you’re using our In-Browser Text Editor, Dropbox, GitHub, or Bitbucket, you’ll be able to use Leanpub Flavoured Markdown or Markua. You can change back and forth between them as often as you want. It’s as easy as clicking a checkbox.
Reasons to Use GitHub or Bitbucket
If you’re a programmer and comfortable with Git, we recommend you choose GitHub or Bitbucket over Dropbox. Here are 5 reasons why:
- You can run your own version control, which is great for collaborating with co-authors and keeping track of versions for yourself.
- You can also choose a Dropbox folder for the generated preview and published versions of your book to be automatically copied into.
- You can set up webhooks so that whenever you commit and push, we automatically preview (or, if you live on the edge, automatically publish) your book.
- You can use different branches for preview and publish, so that you can have a bugfix branch (say master) and a development branch for the next version of your book.
- You can use a different branch for a course, based on the same repository as the book. (Again, courses require that you use Markua, so if you’re writing a book which you think might be a good course, that’s another reason to use it.)
If you’re not a programmer, we recommend using Dropbox mode. Every time you preview or publish, we store a version of your manuscript as a backup, so we recommend you preview and publish often.