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I'm thinking of buying a spot on The Shelf, along with a Sponsored Deal newsletter spot. How many users does Leanpub get? How much traffic the Leanpub homepage get? How many subscribers do the newsletters get?
I'm thinking of buying a spot on The Shelf, along with a Sponsored Deal newsletter spot. How many users does Leanpub get? How much traffic the Leanpub homepage get? How many subscribers do the newsletters get?

Keywords: Shelf, newsletter, newsletters, weekly, monthly, subscribers, traffic

Leanpub Support avatar
Written by Leanpub Support
Updated over a week ago

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.

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 Newsletter Audience

Our Weekly Sale newsletter has over 20,000 subscribers.

Our Monthly Sale newsletter has over 55,000 subscribers.

Our Web Audience

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.

The Shelf

Here is an example of what The Shelf looks like:

Sponsored Deal

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

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