Encouraging interactions between authors and readers is important to us at Leanpub. It is a key part of the Lean Publishing process. We do offer a number of communication features.
Now, obviously we are not going to provide authors with private contact information that belongs to their readers, like their readers' email address, unless they choose to share that information with the author.
Readers Who Have Shared Their Email Address With You
First, you can check to see if anyone has opted in to share their email address with you, by going to the "Customers" page for any book, which you will find here:
leanpub.com/YOUR_BOOK/customers_list
...making sure to replace YOUR_BOOK with your book's unique web address.
You can find a link to this page under "Community" on the Overview page for your book here:
The Customers page for any course can be found here:
https://leanpub.com/course_admin/leanpub/YOUR_COURSE/community/customers
You are permitted to contact people using the email addresses provided there, and to add them to an email newsletter you may have of your own. Just be sure to explain everything clearly and politely!
Ask Your Readers To Contact You Directly
Second, we highly recommend you add a section called "A Message to Readers" (or something like that) at the beginning of the book, that explains the fact that you would like to be able to contact your readers. In that new section, we recommend you add your email address, so anyone who wants to get a full copy of the book eventually, can contact you and give you their email address. You can also use this section to encourage readers to sign up to an email newsletter you may have.
We also recommend you update the About the Book details of your book with a similar section called "A Message to My Readers", where you explain that if they buy your book, they will see a section at the beginning of the book, with your contact information.
Also, you can ask people to email you anytime using our "Email the Author(s)" feature:
Send Update Notifications
Third, when you publish the new version of your book with a significant amount of new content, you may use our feature to notify your readers when you publish the new version of the book. Readers who have opted in to this feature will get a notification about the update by email, and in the notifications section in Leanpub. Typically, many Leanpub readers really do opt in to this feature, particularly readers of unfinished books, who are expecting updates. DO NOT use this feature to spam readers with product offers and announcements!
You can edit About the Book section of your book here:
leanpub.com/YOUR_BOOK/settings/about
...making sure to replace YOUR_BOOK with your book's unique web address.
Activate Your Book or Course Forum
Finally, we recommend you enable the Forum for your book here:
https://leanpub.com/YOUR_BOOK/forum
You can find the same page for any course here:
https://leanpub.com/course_admin/leanpub/YOUR_COURSE/community/forums
Good luck! We hope you have fun interacting with readers, and it helps you grow your audience, and help sell more copies of your books.
To learn about amazing new books and authors, subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/leanpub.
If you have any feedback or questions about this article, please email the Leanpub team about it at hello@leanpub.com!
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!
Are you interested in self-publishing, and 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
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