
Read “The Tao of tmux” prerelease for free online - tony
https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read
======
ludicast
I've liked the books I've gotten from them (usually from Reginald) and will
definitely get this one.

Fun fact - I remember meeting their founder (Peter Armstrong I think) at
RailsConf many years back. He had just written "flex on rails", which was a
great book (though both those technologies are unsexy these days). He
mentioned his idea for something like LeanPub (though I'm not sure how far
along he was at the time).

Great seeing him/them execute on this and become the de facto for self-
publishing.

~~~
peterarmstrong
Thanks!

It's hard to believe that Flexible Rails, and my talk about it at a RailsConf
BOF, was almost a decade ago! Flex was controversial then, but it is beyond
unsexy now :) (Full backstory here:
[https://leanpub.com/lean/read](https://leanpub.com/lean/read))

I have my cofounders, especially Scott Patten who has been there since the
first commit, to thank for so much of how far we've come since then. And
ironically, when you hook a single-page React app up to a Rails backend (which
is what we do in the Leanpub storefront), what you get is (to me, anyway)
reminiscent of the approach I was advocating in Flexible Rails...

------
ianhowe
Slightly off topic: How well is LeanPub working for authors and consumers?
What are the pros and cons of publishing through them versus Amazon KDP?

~~~
git-pull
I may make a larger blog post, but let's try here:

A lot better than iBooks has. This is my first go around at a book, but I can
give a review of the three I tried:

\- Leanpub: Most of my sales have been through this. Very good royalties (90%
minus 50 cents royalties per paid sale). Support (Mike, Len and Peter) is
awesome and very snappy. Coupons. Markdown support is great
([https://leanpub.com/help/manual](https://leanpub.com/help/manual)). The PDF
/ ePub / mobi output is beautiful. Web viewer for paying customers. As you can
see from the HN post, there is a web view you can make available for free
(optionally). There is also a web editor, but I personally use a GitHub hook
so I can edit right in vim.

Another thing, my buyers who preorder get to download immediately, even before
the book is finished. That’s a key thing.

There are some tweaks I’d like to see made to the HTML, as well as some of the
PDF formatting. Over all, I worked around them.

\- Amazon KDP: My second most sales have been on Kindle. I’m not part of the
“KDP select” program since, to my knowledge, it require exclusivity to Kindle.
Royalties are a bit confusing, I’ve heard some say 70% royalty is only for
select, but it looks like if you keep your books under 9.99, you get 70%, but
if you go _above_ 9.99, you only get 35%. I would really like to price point
my book at a higher price, but kindle pushes it down via this. Support is
great. Kindle formatting is great. Customers being able to view the book on
all their devices makes me happy. The interface for uploading books is superb
and just got a face lift this month (Dec 2016).

Overall, I’m happy with KDP so far. Only thing is I don’t think they get
previews of my book, and there’s no way for me to give out free copies (for
proofreading) or coupons.

Also, recently they launched a way to do paperbacks. Haven’t tried it yet, but
looks cool.
([https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A38EE2B71PKD7U](https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A38EE2B71PKD7U))

\- Apple iBooks: I only got 1 presale from them. And they took my book off
their store with no warning. And it’s disappeared from iTunes Producer. Yes,
Apple requires another application for uploading books.

Maybe App and Music developers tolerate this, but for eBooks in December 2016,
it’s a joke. People I’ve seen on iPhones are using Kindle to read since
they’re already invested.

The only thing I miss about it is the feng shui from having a second button to
balance out the “Available at Amazon” button on my websites.

Aside from that, Apple needs to step up their game in this department. I hope
sincerely they make the publisher experience better. They are a great business
and very professional, but I have the impression they’re really sloppy and
disconnected compared to the alternatives. I like to stay humble because Apple
is brilliant, but the ebooks experience is tacked on and I feel like a third
class citizen next to MP3’s and Apps, quite understandably.

~~~
homarp
This is for technical book or fiction ?

~~~
git-pull
You can do either technical or fiction books on all services.

Leanpub is 99usd to start, but they have tools to help you write the book and
generate web pages, epub, pdf and mobi. You can also in turn take those files
and use them to publish on Amazon KDP and Apple iBooks.

As a side note, on LeanPub, there is also book styles for Business, Fiction
and Technical books. It's under "Writing -> Book Theme"

