No. The short argument here is that it is against our principles to set up a system that treats every customer as a potential thief.

We want shopping at Leanpub to be an even better experience than shopping at Amazon, Costco or IKEA -- all stores I love because of how customer-focused they are, and how good their refund policies are.

Here's the thing:

Leanpub being a good place to buy books and courses from benefits you as an author.  About two million people have bought books from us, or downloaded one for free.

Our brand is that we balance the needs of authors and readers, and that we conduct ourselves in a way that treats authors and readers the way they would want to be treated. 

Sometimes, such as in this case, it involves saying no to an author.  While our authors are our most important customers, their needs do not always win.  Sometimes we must say no to authors, in order to make Leanpub better for them overall.

This is not a systemic issue.  Our refund rates are very low.  Specifically, they are about 1%.  Also, please note that if discovered someone was abusing the refund policy by doing mass refunds, we would terminate their account.

Finally, we believe that authors in general would be a lot better off just taking the effort they spend on worrying about this type of stuff and just writing or doing more marketing more instead.  By "this type of stuff", I mean the type of stuff that Leanpub will not be helpful with and that actually does not matter in the end.  It includes refunds, piracy, book layout, widows and orphans, what something looks like on older Kindles, etc.

We are firm on this. This is part of what Leanpub stands for.

Hopefully it works for you. If not, you can still use Leanpub to produce your books without using the Leanpub storefront. You own your work, not us. But we own our storefront policies.

If you have any feedback or questions about this article, please email the Leanpub team about it at hello@leanpub.com!

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