For completed books, we generally recommend self-published authors "go wide", experimenting with selling your books on multiple self-publishing platforms.
Of course, we also recommend you publish your book on the Leanpub bookstore, not only because we pay an 80% royalty rate (we actually show customers how much money the "Author Earns" from every sale), but also because we offer a number of relatively unique self-publishing features and processes, which you can learn more about in this article.
However, we don't think that the "go wide" approach makes sense for a book you're publishing chapter-by-chapter, as you write it.
As long as a book is being published chapter-by-chapter, as a work in progress, we feel it makes sense for it to only be sold on Leanpub, since that way your readers get automatic updates when you publish new versions, and the only thing you have to do to update your book for all your readers is click the button to publish a new version on Leanpub,
(Side Note: If you're a self-published author who has already published an ebook elsewhere, you can use Leanpub's Upload writing mode to get your book published on our online bookstore in just a few minutes, and earn 80% from every Leanpub sale!)
If you're writing a book and publishing lots of versions of it while you're writing, the last thing you want to deal with is having to update your book in a bunch of storefronts, every time you release a new version.
One important thing to keep in mind is Leanpub's 80% royalty rate applies to all the books you sell on Leanpub regardless of the minimum or maximum price you set, or where the buyer is located (people can buy Leanpub books from the countries supported by Stripe or PayPal). For more information on our pricing range, please see this article.
Amazon KDP (at the time this article was written) offers its 70% royalty rate only for books priced under $10.00, and only 35% for books priced $10.00 or more. This is especially relevant if you are writing a non-fiction, academic, technical, or research-heavy book that ought to be priced over $9.99.
Also, Leanpub books are priced using variable pricing. Variable pricing lets you set both a minimum and a suggested price for the book, and then lets each reader choose what to pay.
This is a really powerful method for selling ebooks online, as it expands the range of customers, establishes a special connection between author and reader, and even allows some books to be sold that otherwise would not be sold, because the author needs the book to be available for a free minimum price.
So, we think there are lots of great online bookstores out there for self-published authors to try, and we encourage experimenting with many of them if you're book is finished, but none of them are optimized for in-progress publishing quite like we are.
OK, that's it!
Interested in creating your first Leanpub book? Here are some quick tutorials for our most popular writing modes: http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/3088382-quick-walkthroughs-for-getting-started-on-a-leanpub-book
If you have any questions or thoughts on writing and self-publishing with Leanpub, please join our global community of authors in our Authors Forum here!
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