Leanpub authors can promote their books by purchasing promotional spots on The Shelf feature near the top of our homepage, and Sponsored Deal spots in our popular discount sale email newsletters. You can purchase these spots on Leanpub here:

https://leanpub.com/shelf/buy

Please note that currently pricing and other information will only be shown if you have an eligible, published book on Leanpub. If you do have an eligible book, it currently looks like this:

You can also currently get a Shelf spot and sponsored newsletter spot as part of our GlobalAuthor service here:

https://leanpub.com/global_author/buy

One of the purposes of paid book promotions is to build a self-reinforcing system of promotion and sales, so your book project effectively becomes self-funding. This is one of the key aspects of succeeding in any self-publishing project, if your goal is to sell as many books as possible.

(If that sounds really obvious, it's actually the case that a lot of book projects are primarily aimed at enhancing the author's public profile, and not specifically looking to make money! This is particularly true for consultants or self-employed professionals.)

To help Leanpub authors promote their books, we have built a couple of ways for them to get their work in front of the "eyeballs" of Leanpub readers specifically.

In addition, we've also built a feature that actually lets you use your unpaid royalties to get a discount on these promotional purchases!

If you're thinking about buying a Leanpub promotional spot, below you'll find some information about our audience that we hope will help guide you in your decision.

Our Weekly Sale newsletter has over 40,000 subscribers.

Our Monthly Sale newsletter has over 80,000 subscribers.

Leanpub has about 250,000 monthly active users.

However, most of our traffic goes directly to a book landing page, and from there people can navigate to other pages on the Leanpub website. So, our actual homepage (which is where The Shelf lives) gets about 35,000 monthly page views.

We don't just show The Shelf on the homepage, however: we also show The Shelf on every post-purchase Thank You page.
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It is hard to measure how well a spot on The Shelf converts, since not all purchases are caused by an immediate click and purchase: being on The Shelf also leads to subsequent purchases later, etc. However, it's a lot easier to measure how well a link in a Weekly Sale or Monthly Sale converts, since (assuming that your book has opted into our discounts) we use coupon codes which show up in your reporting for your book's sales.

So, because we want to help our authors sell as many books as possible and we want to make tracking shelf spot performance easier, as of April 30, 2021, all spots on The Shelf are bundled with a sponsored newsletter spot. This way, you can easily see how well that part of the advertising purchase performed, even though the performance of the Shelf spot itself is a lot harder to measure directly. (You can just compare month-over-month, of course, to get an estimate, assuming that you keep other promotional efforts at a similar level, etc.)

Please note that if you have opted in for a book or package to be eligible for inclusion in our weekly and monthly discount sales, any Sponsored Deal spot you buy for that book will be for the coupon discount we would have used for normal inclusion in a newsletter sale.

To learn how to opt in to being included in our weekly and monthly sales, please see this article.

Here is an example of what The Shelf looks like:

Here is an example of what Sponsored Deal spots look like in our newsletters:

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

Are you looking for great deals on Leanpub ebooks, ebook bundles, and courses? Sign up for our Weekly and Monthly newsletter sales here!

To learn about amazing new books and authors, subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/leanpub.

You can also follow Leanpub in lots of other places!