In 2022, we introduced a "Reader Membership" program that provides authors a unique way to make money from books with a minimum price of free.
Here are a few factors to consider, if you're thinking of opting one or more of your books into the program:
The Reader Membership program is not for everyone!
The most common reason authors opt a book in to the Reader Membership program is that they want their book to be available for purchase on Leanpub at a non-free Suggested Price, but they would like to make their book available for less, to Leanpub readers who buy a Reader Membership.
For example, we have a few very niche exam prep books whose minimum price is $200 or more. If the authors of those books are trying to maximize their earnings, there is no chance that they should make their books either have a free minimum price, or be free with membership! They'll earn way more from just selling their books at a premium price.
The Reader Membership program is easy to opt out of
It is very easy to opt out of our Reader Membership program, after you opt in. You can do one of two things, on the Pricing page for your book:
a) Uncheck the "Allow Free Purchases" checkbox, to make the minimum paid price for your book be the minimum price.
b) Allow free purchases by having the "Allow Free Purchases" checkbox be checked, but do not require a Reader Membership for a free purchase. (So, have the "Free purchases of this book require a Reader, Standard or Pro membership" checkbox below it be unchecked.)
The Reader Membership program is intended for to help authors earn money from books that are very affordable
The use case for opting a book in to the Reader Membership program is ususally, "I was making basically nothing giving my books away for free, how can Leanpub help me?"
Before the Reader Membership program was launched, there were a number of pretty high quality books which were earning almost nothing, since they had free Minimum and Suggested prices, or they had low non-free suggested prices, even though they were both high quality and niche.
One of Leanpub's problems over the years is that authors undervalue themselves or their work, and don't charge enough for their work!
Again, the most straightforward way to earn money from sales of your Leanpub books is to not allow free purchases, with or without a Reader Membership. Then people need to pay for your book, and the entire Reader Membership program has no effect on you at all.
The Reader Membership program is possibly orthogonal to revenue drop off
Most books earn a meaningful amount of their money around their launch period. Almost every book (free or paid) has a revenue drop off over time. It varies based on how evergreen the content is, and how much marketing the author does etc., of course.
Over the years, there have been many very successful Leanpub books which, after a few years of being completed, earned way less in a typical month than they did in a month during their first few years. This is just how things often work.
The Reader Membership program does not pay much revenue for a particular membership
The Reader Membership model is to pay half of the revenue from a particular membership to all the authors of qualifying products that the reader uses their membership to get for free.
So, say some reader buys a One Year membership for $19 on January 1, 2023. Then, the maximum amount of money any author can earn from that reader membership is $19/2 = $9.50.
It does not matter if the reader gets books with a total suggested price of $10 or $1000 - the amount that is up for grabs by authors from that particular membership period is $9.50.
To earn $9.50 from that reader, the following would need to happen:
That reader would need to buy no other books during the 1 year period from January 1, 2023 to January 1, 2024. If the reader bought other books during that period, then we would essentially split the royalty pool between the books based on their suggested prices. This is explained more fully in our https://leanpub.com/imagine_a_world essay. We also discuss it in the Terms of Service a bit https://leanpub.com/terms in section 3.5, but the essay is way better.
But the big picture is the following:
Say the reader uses their reader membership to get 10 free books with the same suggested prices in a 1 year period. Then, each of the books only pays the author 95 cents, not $9.50. And if it's 100 free books (all with the same suggested price) in that 1 year period, then it's not 95 cents each, it's 9 cents each!
Now, 95 cents and 9 cents are both way, way less than a Leanpub author would earn from a paid sale. But they're also both infinitely more than what a Leanpub author would earn from a free sale :)
There is a significant delay on Reader Membership payments:
For a Monthly or a One Year Reader Membership, we wait until one whole year has elapsed before making a related payment to an author. Then we do the Reader Membership revenue split for that membership, as explained above. The reason for this delay is that we need to wait until the entire one year period has elapsed before allocating the membership fairly. And this is also true for monthly memberships, since we want to be equitable in how we split the revenue, and some months a reader would get no books with the membership, and other months they would get a lot of books with it.
The delay is even longer for a Lifetime Reader Membership. That has a price of $99. But the way that works is we split it as $99/2 = $49.50, and then divide that by 5 and pay out $9.90 per year for the first 5 years of purchases in the membership, with each year of purchases in a group. (Otherwise it would be unfair to authors whose books were purchased later.) This is also explained more fully in our
https://leanpub.com/imagine_a_world essay.
So, it is entirely possible that you will eventually earn $49.50 from someone who bought a Lifetime Reader Membership. But for that to happen, the following would need to occur:
a) They'd need to not get a refund
b) They'd need to use their Lifetime Reader Membership to get one of your Allow Free Purchases and Free Purchases Require Membership books for free
c) They'd need to not use their Lifetime Reader Membership to get any other books for free
d) One year would need to elapse (paying you $9.90)
e) A second year would need to elapse, with that reader not using their Lifetime Reader Membership to get any other books for free (paying you another $9.90)
f) A third year would need to elapse, with that reader not using their Lifetime Reader Membership to get any other books for free (paying you another $9.90)
g) A fourth year would need to elapse, with that reader not using their Lifetime Reader Membership to get any other books for free (paying you another $9.90)
h) A fifth year would need to elapse, with that reader not using their Lifetime Reader Membership to get any other books for free (paying you another $9.90)
Since all Reader Membership revenue is delayed by at least a year, an accurate understanding is delayed by at least a year:
Even if you ignore any Lifetime Reader Membership revenue after the first year (where 80% of that revenue is), there is a one year delay in the understanding of how much you have earned.
There is a $100 minimum payout on Reader Membership Revenue:
We make the Reader Membership Revenue payouts manually via Wise or PayPal, since it's done totally separately from normal Leanpub royalties. So, we have a $100 minimum payout for Reader Membership Revenue, to make this doable for us to manage until we eventually have it automated.
We hope this extended discussion is helpful! Again, if you have decided the Reader Membership program is not for you, the simple thing to do is opt out of it on your Pricing page, either by disabling Free Purchases or by not requiring them to require a Reader Membership.
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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