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What are the different features in the Free, Standard and Pro author plans?
What are the different features in the Free, Standard and Pro author plans?

Keywords: plan, paid, features, free, standard, pro

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Written by Leanpub Support
Updated over a week ago

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You can see the plans and features in our plans if you go the page where you create a book or a course and scroll down. Here's a screenshot:

(If you already have a Leanpub account and you would to upgrade your account to a Standard or a Pro account, please go to your account Subscriptions page here.)

Most of the features offered in our Standard and Pro plans are self-explanatory, but some do need to be set out in detail. This article should help you understand all the features in the different plans.

What are the "Standard Themes"?

When you create a Leanpub book, there are three "Book Themes" to choose from. You can switch back and forth between the themes as much as you like.

The themes are named "Business", "Technical", and "Fiction", to reflect typical expectations for books in these genres. For example, books in the technical genre tend to have bigger page sizes than fiction books. Please note you can actually write any kind of book you want, using any theme you want!

Each theme has a number of settings that you can see on the "Book Theme" page for your book.

Here is an article with screenshots that show you the settings for the different Book Themes:

Another thing to note about the page sizes of the Book Themes: these only affect the PDF. EPUB and MOBI files are read in apps and on devices that let people choose font size, and the page size settings for your Leanpub book will have no effect on how the book appears when people are reading either the EPUB or the MOBI version of your book.

Write on your computer, and sync with Dropbox or GitHub

These three writing modes let you write your book in plain text files stored in a folder on your computer. Your files are "shared" with Leanpub through a third-party service.

That way, you write your manuscript on your computer, and create your ebook on Leanpub, without needing to upload files to Leanpub.

GitHub lets you write using Git version control, which is a really powerful way to write a book, but if you want to write on your computer and don't want to learn any of this "Git" stuff, we recommend you choose the Dropbox option :)

Custom Themes

Custom Themes let you choose from among quite a few different formatting options: you can see screenshots of the options if you scroll down here:
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โ€‹http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/3691789-what-are-the-settings-for-each-of-the-different-book-themes

You can use this feature to create print-ready PDFs for third-party print-on-demand sites like Lulu and Amazon.

Here is an article that explains this feature:

Google Analytics

You can use this feature to add your book's Leanpub landing page to Google Analytics, so you can track traffic to your landing page.

Here is an article with some information about how to set up your book on Google Analytics:

Leanpub API

You can use the Leanpub API to do cool things like triggering previews and getting book summary information. Here are the docs:

InDesign Export

You can use this feature to export your manuscript in InDesign format. This is useful if you are handing off your completed book to a professional book designer, or if you want to do the design yourself in Adobe's InDesign app.

Limited or Unlimited Previewing and Publishing

When you write a Leanpub book, you can create "Previews" of your book, to see what it looks like in the multiple formats we provide.

We also encourage authors to "Publish Early, Publish Often". Publishing your book puts it up for sale on our bookstore, where you will earn 80% in royalties on every sale. Whenever you publish a new version of your book, that new version is instantly available to all of your current readers, and is the one that will be bought by any new readers. Please note your readers get all your updates for free!

On a Free plan, you can preview and publish, collectively, up to twenty times per month. On a Standard or a Pro plan, you have unlimited previewing and publishing.


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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