Read “The Tao of tmux” prerelease for free online
leanpub.com
leanpub.com
Fun fact - I remember meeting their founder (Peter Armstrong I think) at RailsConf many years back. He had just written "flex on rails", which was a great book (though both those technologies are unsexy these days). He mentioned his idea for something like LeanPub (though I'm not sure how far along he was at the time).
Great seeing him/them execute on this and become the de facto for self-publishing.
Or else I'd be futzing around with Sphinx (http://www.sphinx-doc.org/).
I'm a happy publisher at this time. My customers are also happy.
It's hard to believe that Flexible Rails, and my talk about it at a RailsConf BOF, was almost a decade ago! Flex was controversial then, but it is beyond unsexy now :) (Full backstory here: https://leanpub.com/lean/read)
I have my cofounders, especially Scott Patten who has been there since the first commit, to thank for so much of how far we've come since then. And ironically, when you hook a single-page React app up to a Rails backend (which is what we do in the Leanpub storefront), what you get is (to me, anyway) reminiscent of the approach I was advocating in Flexible Rails...
A lot better than iBooks has. This is my first go around at a book, but I can give a review of the three I tried:
- Leanpub: Most of my sales have been through this. Very good royalties (90% minus 50 cents royalties per paid sale). Support (Mike, Len and Peter) is awesome and very snappy. Coupons. Markdown support is great (https://leanpub.com/help/manual). The PDF / ePub / mobi output is beautiful. Web viewer for paying customers. As you can see from the HN post, there is a web view you can make available for free (optionally). There is also a web editor, but I personally use a GitHub hook so I can edit right in vim.
Another thing, my buyers who preorder get to download immediately, even before the book is finished. That’s a key thing.
There are some tweaks I’d like to see made to the HTML, as well as some of the PDF formatting. Over all, I worked around them.
- Amazon KDP: My second most sales have been on Kindle. I’m not part of the “KDP select” program since, to my knowledge, it require exclusivity to Kindle. Royalties are a bit confusing, I’ve heard some say 70% royalty is only for select, but it looks like if you keep your books under 9.99, you get 70%, but if you go above 9.99, you only get 35%. I would really like to price point my book at a higher price, but kindle pushes it down via this. Support is great. Kindle formatting is great. Customers being able to view the book on all their devices makes me happy. The interface for uploading books is superb and just got a face lift this month (Dec 2016).
Overall, I’m happy with KDP so far. Only thing is I don’t think they get previews of my book, and there’s no way for me to give out free copies (for proofreading) or coupons.
Also, recently they launched a way to do paperbacks. Haven’t tried it yet, but looks cool. (https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A38EE2B71PKD7U)
- Apple iBooks: I only got 1 presale from them. And they took my book off their store with no warning. And it’s disappeared from iTunes Producer. Yes, Apple requires another application for uploading books.
Maybe App and Music developers tolerate this, but for eBooks in December 2016, it’s a joke. People I’ve seen on iPhones are using Kindle to read since they’re already invested.
The only thing I miss about it is the feng shui from having a second button to balance out the “Available at Amazon” button on my websites.
Aside from that, Apple needs to step up their game in this department. I hope sincerely they make the publisher experience better. They are a great business and very professional, but I have the impression they’re really sloppy and disconnected compared to the alternatives. I like to stay humble because Apple is brilliant, but the ebooks experience is tacked on and I feel like a third class citizen next to MP3’s and Apps, quite understandably.
Leanpub is 99usd to start, but they have tools to help you write the book and generate web pages, epub, pdf and mobi. You can also in turn take those files and use them to publish on Amazon KDP and Apple iBooks.
As a side note, on LeanPub, there is also book styles for Business, Fiction and Technical books. It's under "Writing -> Book Theme"
You can publish your Leanpub books on Amazon KDP as well. We encourage our authors to do so once their books are complete.
We think we're the best way in the world to write a technical book, and the best place to publish it in-progress. Once it's done, we're one of a handful of really good places to sell it, including Amazon KDP and Apple's iBookstore.
I wrote a fair bit about this in my pricing essay earlier this year: https://leanpub.com/pricing
In terms of how we're working for authors: we're closing in on $5M of royalties paid. Every month we pay over $100K of royalties. So, pretty well so far. And we have some great things planned for 2017...
For readers: our books are DRM-free, and we have a 45-day, 100% happiness guarantee. So, we think we're a nice place to buy and read ebooks.