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

You can write reviews of books and courses you buy on Leanpub, and if you have a Reader Membership, you can show your reviews on your profile page.

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 you submit a review of a book or course, the author can choose to display the review on their 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

- Reading and writing reviews helps readers feel engaged with books and courses and authors

- Reviews let you share your thoughts with other people, which helps build discussion and community

- Your eviews generally let other people evaluate something before they buy it

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

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

When you buy a book and select it in your library, you will see a "Write a Review" button, like this:

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

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

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

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

Clicking "View Past Reviews" will take you to your own Reviews page, like this:

You can click on the review to see the details:

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

Note that on your Reviews page, you be able to see if the author has featured it on thir book's landing page (which we explain in this article for authors):

When an author features your review, you'll get an in-app notification about it, like this:

On your Reviews page, you will also see that the review has been Featured:

If you have a Reader Membership (or if you are an established Leanpub author), you can enable your reviews to be viewed on your profile page, like this:

This screenshot shows "Anonymous" and no profile picture because it's just a demo account.

You can enable your reviews to be shown on your profile page by going to your account Profile page here:

https://leanpub.com/account/settings

Make sure to scroll down and click Save Settings after you enable "Show reviews on profile":

You can add your name and picture on your account Profile page.

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 Announced vs Private versions.

To view these version details, an author goes to the the "Manuscript Versions" page for their book:

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

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

A published version of a book is "Announced" if the author issues "Release Notes" when they 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:

You can only write one review per Announced version of a book.

That means you can only write a new review after the auhotr publishes a new Announced 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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