Leanpub books can be updated any time, and many are what we call "living" books, that will continue to be edited and added to, for as long as the author maintains the project.

But sometimes, even in a world of updatable books, it's still better to write, publish, and sell a brand new edition, which is a separate book from the original book.

(For some observations on the difference between a new "version" of a book, and a new "edition" of a book, please see this article.)

After you have created your new book on Leanpub for the new edition, you can indicate that your old book has a new version available.

When you do this, people will see a message about the new edition on the old book's landing page, with a link to the new edition, like this:

To show that your old book has a new edition like in the example above, go to your old book's About page here:

...making sure to replace YOUR_BOOK with your book's unique web address.

You can also find the About page on your book's Overview page, under Settings:

Scroll to the bottom of the About page for your book, where you will see the "This Book Has a New Edition" section:

Select your new book from the dropdown and click the blue "Update Book" button:

Your old book's landing page will now have a section like the example we showed in the earlier screenshot, pointing readers to the new edition.

After you publish your new edition, you may want to let readers of the old edition know about the new one.

To let readers of the old edition know about the new edition, we recommend you do the following:

1. Point readers from the old book to the new book, following the instructions in the previous section of this article.

2. Update the "About the Book" section for the old book's landing page, explaining that there is a new edition of the book, and linking to it.

3. Add a section at the beginning of the old book, explaining that there is a new version.

4. When you go to publish the new version of the old book, after completing step 3 above, write some "Release Notes" to your readers, explaining the situation. We also recommend that in the Release Notes, you offer your readers a discount coupon link for purchasing the new version; you can find instructions for doing that here.

Currently, there is no feature that lets you provide a free copy of the new edition to to everyone who purchased the first edition.

We recommend the following:

- Make a free coupon for the new edition:

- Publish a new version of the old book with "release notes" that will go to existing readers, and include the free coupon (with an explanation about the new edition) in the release notes:

- Optionally mention in the About the Book section for both the old edition and the new edition, and in any blog posts etc., that readers with the old edition can contact you to ask for a free coupon for the new edition.

Now, the risk with this approach is that the free coupon will be shared with people who did not buy the first edition.

You can use the "Max # Uses" setting when you create the coupon to limit the risk, but it's still possible some people will share the coupon code.

There might be a way to use our Batch Coupons feature to get around this, or reduce the work involved:

You could also try reaching out on the Authors Forum to see how other authors have handled this situation:

https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors

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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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