peterarmstrong

"That single gram of silica gel could have an internal surface area of eight hundred square meters—the size of almost two basketball courts."

This reads like something from The Three Body Problem :)

What, hackathons require admission applications these days? Holy crap I'm getting old...

Write an in-progress book about some niche = lead magnet for this type of work :)

(disclosure: founder of Leanpub)

Yeah, I was going to write the same thing.

When you realize it was supposed to be a graphic novel, that makes the over-the-top scenes make so much more sense. It's a comic book without the comics.

(I also think it's great, btw.)

Also, Asakusa Kid (biopic of him) is a really good movie, and Hana-bi is a great movie as well.

phalates

No. You discuss it with your manager, and you do it at the appropriate time. Having both created, refactored and deleted lots of technical debt over the past 25 years, trust me: you just don't get to go rogue because "you're the engineer". If you do that, it might turn into "you were the engineer".

What if you spend a week or month refactoring something that needs a quick fix now and is being deleted in 1-2 years? That's waste, and if you went rogue, it's your fault. Besides, you always create added QA burden with large refactoring (yes even if you have tests), and you should not do that without a discussion first--even if you're the founder.

Communicate with your manager and (if they agree) VP if needed, and do the right thing at the right time.

Maybe the young men measured have low enough testosterone ranges that the high/low cycles have less effect, but the more likely explanation is that the methodology of this study is pretty laughable...

I can recognize my wife and son perfectly fine, I just can't make pictures of them in my mind.

Longer version: https://leanpub.com/aphantasia/read

Thank you from Leanpub!

What this leads to is the joke of guidelines like in Victoria, Canada, where the city basically is trying to mandate that buildings look "interesting", where interesting is defined as "the developer built it out of Jenga blocks that didn't quite line up right" and "used as many different colors as you would get fonts in a school newsletter".

Hey, in Canada the newest model will be! Next year we'll have, what, four F-35s? We'd almost be better off making a bunch of that bronze armour and the cool hats...

Friendly note: losing, not loosing :)

The cycle also goes hand-in-hand with languages and frameworks. I use VSCode for Ruby on Rails editing, but I don't need to. With TypeScript, however, it's a huge win -- just as IDEA or Eclipse were essential for Java, back in the day.

We treat all author support issues to hello@leanpub.com as confidential, of course. For author support issues which are fine to discuss in public, you can see our author forum at https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors ... If you look there, you can see a representative sample of the issues people have had recently. (I don't want to turn this HN thread into a Leanpub author support forum thread, of course! However, our authors typically seem pretty happy with our service...)

Agreed! We don't do anything to help with that part of the process: you need to use that page either way :)

Regardless of what type of book your wife is writing, if she uses Leanpub she needs to do the upload to KDP herself: Leanpub doesn't currently do anything here.

There are other companies like BookBaby which do the "publish to Amazon for you" type of thing; Leanpub currently does not do that. We are just a toolchain to make ebooks plus an optional storefront to sell them. You can sell the ebooks you produce using Leanpub on any storefront such as KDP; you own your work. We do not have many romance writers on Leanpub, and a simple look at our homepage will explain why: our storefront looks like a place for computer programming books, not romance novels.

Also, most romance novels are written in Word, not Markdown, and our Word support is a hidden feature, kind of like the secret menu at In-N-Out burger. The way our Word support works is that you write in a Dropbox folder (or using GitHub or Bitbucket), and you make your Book.txt file list one or more Word files (instead of Markdown files) as the manuscript content. Then when you click the button to preview or publish the ebook, we generate the PDF, EPUB and MOBI based on those Word files, and you can do whatever you want with them. It's actually pretty smooth once you set it up, but it sounds really complicated, and we don't market it at all: hence another reason we don't have many romance writers on Leanpub!

Anyway, if that sounds like a useful thing then we may be worth a shot. Leanpub book landing pages look nice and professional, but in terms of attracting an audience of readers for a romance novel, we are not going to be much help. This is why places like Wattpad do well in this regard. (Leanpub does help attract an audience for our computer programming books and similar types of books, of course, primarily through our weekly and monthly sale newsletters.)

Frankly, my recommendation for any aspiring first-time novelist with a small social media following would be to publish in-progress on Wattpad first to see if they get traction, and then to consider Substack and Amazon KDP for places to monetize if they do. Then once they've gotten to that point, if they're looking for tools to produce a nice ebook to sell on KDP, Leanpub is one of the options they can use as a toolchain.

(On the other hand, if they have a reasonable social media following, they could skip Wattpad and go directly to Substack, KDP or even Leanpub and point their followers at the appropriate landing page for their book...)

Thanks :)

Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA), but Leanpub has never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction. We do well in our niche of computer programming / data science / business types of books, but we have essentially no traction in fiction for a number of reasons.

If an author was going to use Leanpub for fiction, the right thing to do would be to use our toolchain to generate the ebook and print-ready PDF, but then to also publish it on Amazon KDP and Wattpad for the exposure. For example, my teenage son did this with his debut sci-fi novel: he wrote it in Word (since he didn't want to write in Markdown, despite my best efforts to convince him that Markdown was superior), did a git push to his book repo on GitHub, generated the ebook on Leanpub (our Word support is an unofficial hidden feature; we just use pandoc to turn the .docx into Markdown first), and then uploaded it to Amazon. Ironically, the worst thing about this whole process was at the end: he also had to copy and paste the chapters into Wattpad when he did an update, and Wattpad wants small chapters for page views, so the copying and pasting was a very slow manual process...

One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.)

Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and earn $80,000. This is the royalty rate on Leanpub (disclosure: cofounder), but with Gumroad or blog + Stripe approaches you'd earn an even better percentage (if you want to run your own store).

For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that. If you can get a few thousand people to subscribe for a few bucks a month, you could do well. The people at the top are doing really, really well: https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/

Sounds good re. #2. Re, #1, we don't offer anything in terms of an interactive environment at the moment, and we probably won't do so for a long time. That seems like a full startup in itself.

Instead, we are differentiating by focusing on being the easiest way of making a course based on Markdown (since our books are already typically written in Markdown, so the conversion is simple). These courses need to have automated marking and certificates of course, but everything else (video, interactivity, etc) is either optional (like video) or not supported (like interactive exercises).

For us, the big win is on making courses which are easy to update: recording a video course takes a long time, so updating a video course regularly typically just doesn't happen...

Hi Sundeep,

[Leanpub co-founder here.]

Thanks for the kind words about Leanpub, and for choosing Leanpub as one of your publishing platforms!

We're fond of our pricing sliders and of our newsletters as well :) Also, thanks for the very fair comparison with us and Gumroad. Gumroad is an excellent service, and this type of detailed information will be helpful to many authors.

In terms of the differences on payment timing, the reason Leanpub takes longer to pay is so that we can offer the 45-day risk-free 100% refund policy on all purchases, which we believe helps increase sales...)

Finally, two questions for you:

1. Have you considered also converting your books into courses in Leanpub? We think we've built the best and easiest way to produce courses based on Markdown. Also, courses naturally have a higher price point than books, especially when bundled into course sets.

2. Would you like to be on our Frontmatter podcast (https://leanpub.com/podcasts/frontmatter)?

Thanks,

Peter

At Leanpub, authors keep 80% of the title's price. We've paid over $7.5M in royalties to authors, and we're alive and well :)

Write in Markdown, click a button, get a book (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). Click a different button and your book is for sale with an attractive landing page, etc. You can even create a MOOC with one click, again based on Markdown...

(disclosure: cofounder)

Obligatory link, via pmarca archive:

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Speaking of OSS: essentially the whole reason that the term "Open Source Software" exists is because the Free Software Foundation often comes across like this. "Free Software" is the brand for people who think that modest proposals like this one are reasonable; Open Source is the brand for actually pragmatic people.

The fact that you'll write "I'm all for OSS, but..." shows how successful this cultural branding effort has been...

ANA theme music? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB4fm_kO1us

Yep, this is going to be Altered Carbon or Ghost In The Shell type of crap. Whatever you Google for will follow you everywhere, and nag you until you buy it...

Yes, but individual perfect micro of 50 blink stalkers is beyond the capability of any pro, whereas I can spam-create Zerg units by holding down a key and have higher APM for a split-second, and I'm just a garbage diamond player.

Thanks! :)

(Leanpub co-founder here.)

I like to think that some of our books are between 30% and 110% of what you'd expect from an O'Reilly book. They don't have things like indexes, but the advantage is that authors can write in a dialect of Markdown, preview or publish with one click, and distribute updates to readers automatically.

So, many of our books start as 30% or less of what you'd expect from an O'Reilly book, and grow to be as much or more than one.

In terms of the "or more" part, this can include being more specialized than what would be considered marketable.

It can also, however, include being offered as a course: a Leanpub manuscript written in Markua (one of our two Markdown dialects) can also be used as the basis for a course.

To learn more about that, the spec is here: https://leanpub.com/markua/read#leanpub-auto-creating-a-cour...

(And thanks to that bug being pointed out to us, that link should even work well on phones now :)