There's a full article with screenshots below, but you watch the Lean Publishing Tip of the Day Livestream on this topic here:

Leanpub readers can write reviews of books and courses.

In this article, we're going to explain why Leanpub supports reviews, how readers can write reviews, how you can learn about and manage the display of reviews, and more!

Anyone who buys a book or course can write a review by just selecting it in their library:

When they submit a review of your book or course, you'll get an in-app notification, and you'll see it on the Reviews page for your book or course, where you can then choose to display the review on your book or course landing page, if you want to.

Reviews play an important role on our platform in a number of ways:

- Feedback from readers is a very important part of the Lean Publishing process

- Raeding and writing reviews makes readers feel engaged with books and courses and authors

- Writing reviews is an enjoyable and empowering form of personal expression

- Reviews let people share their thoughts with each other, which helps build discussion and community

- Reviews generally let customers evaluate something before they buy it

- Reviews are an imporant vector for discoverability in the vast online ecosystem of books and courses

- Crucially for in-progress books, reviews let readers update their analysis of a book or course based on the author's unique writing journey to completion

When someone buys your book and selects it in their library, they will see a "Write a Review" button, like this:

When they click the "Write a Review" button, they will see a star rating option, and a "Review" box, like this:

Currently, they are required to make a star rating from one to five stars, and they can write their review in the Review box (including paragraph breaks by typing Enter/Return), like this:

When they're ready, they just need to click the "Submit Review" button:

The reader will then see that they have written a review of your book, and a link to view their own past reviews:

Clicking "View Past Reviews" will take them to their own Reviews page, like this:

They can click on the review to see the details:

...which will open open up a box that shows them the text of the review, the option to show it on their public profile page (if they have a Reader Membership), and an option to delete their review, like this:

Note that on their Reviews page, readers who submit reviews will be able to see if you have featured it on your book's landing page (which we'll explain below):

When someone submits a review of your book, you'll see an in-app notification on your avatar at the top right, wherever it's visible on the site:

To see your in-app notifications, click on your avatar and the notifications message:

This will take you to your Notifications page (currently, you may have to actually click the Notifications page to get out of the menu):

To see the review, click "View Reviews":

That will take you to the Reviews page for the book:

You can also get to the Reviews page for your book from the book's Overview page, in the "Community" section:

You can click on a review to see more details:

...which will look like this:

If you want to feature the review on your book's landing page, you need to do two things.

First, click the "Show Reviews" button:

Next, click the "Feature" button:

Your book's Reviews page will now look like this:

You can click the "your product page" link to go to your book's product page in a new browser tab:

Scroll down and you'll see the "Featured Reviews" section for your book:

When you feature a reader's review, they'll get an in-app notification about it, like this:

On their Reviews page, they will also see that the review has been Featured:

If the user who submitted the review has a Reader Membership (or they are an established Leanpub author), the can enable their reviews to be viewed on their profile page, like this:

This screenshot shows "Anonymous" and no profile picture because it's just a demo account. Real Leanpub users can add their name and picture if they want to.

This part of how reviews work is inherently a bit complicated, but we'll try to explain it as clearly and briefly as we can!

Many Leanpub books are published in-progress, a chapter a time, and all Leanpub books can be easily updated by the author any time.

Now, reviews of updatable books would be confusing, unless you had some way of matching the review to the version of the book it was written about.

To achieve this, we introduced two new concepts for Leanpub books and courses: version numbers and Public vs Private versions.

To view these version details, go the the "Manuscript Versions" page for your book:

On the Manuscript Versions page for your book, you will see that each published version has a version number, and is marked "Public" or "Private".

We may update our naming convention here, but the basic idea is that a "Public" published version is a big release, of, say, an entire chapter, worthy of a "new version available" announcement to your readers.

A published version of your book is "Public" if you issue "Release Notes" when you hit the publish button.

A "Private" published version means you published a new version of your book without Release Notes. Typically authors do this just to fix typos or do some editing, when no announcement is really required. (You want to be able to update your book without spamming readers with notifications, basically.)

When a reader writes a review, it is associated with the version number of the Public version of the book, as you can see if you look back at the screenshots above, for example:

A reader can only write one review per Public version of your book.

That means they can only write a new review after you publish a new Public version of the book.

If you have any questions or feedback for this article, please email the Leanpub Team at hello@leanpub.com.

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