Leanpub Author Forum
Community discussions
Welcome to the brand new Leanpub Author Forum!
Here we discuss writing, publishing, and selling on Leanpub. We're shipping our own forums so that we can better integrate them with books and courses, and we decided to just use them for everything.
GIF reactions are coming soon. We needed to go live before we could apply for production access, so give it a while :)
Hi folks
I hope you won't mind me posting this, but I've vibe coded an editor called Markup.
https://github.com/drchrispinnock/markup
It was written very much with Leanpub book writing and editing in git repos mode in mind. I know there are many ways to edit markdown files but I wanted something that suits me.
This one will treat a manuscript folder as a project. It will hunt and display your images from resources/ . It has two modes - formatted mode (i.e. WYSIWYG) and markdown mode. You can have variables in your text too (e.g. things that might change in lots of places) and it also supports a bibliography. It uses the Mac's dictionary and grammar checker too.
I'm using it to write a Leanpub book at the moment. There are a few things missing, but by and large it is usable. (Mac only I'm afraid)
All the best
Chris
Hi, having MFA support for Leanpub account would be really good to have in 2026. Nowadays MFA is like a base requirement for most systems to provide additional layer of security for the users.
I'd like to suggest adding support for **highlighted / marked text** in Markua.
A number of Markdown editors and extensions already use the following simple and readable syntax:
This is ==important text== in a paragraph.
The expected rendering would be equivalent to the semantic HTML `<mark>` element: highlighted text, typically displayed with a yellow background.
This would be particularly useful for technical and educational books, where authors often need to draw the reader's attention to a few words or a short passage without using bold or italics.
Ideally, I think this should be a **semantic feature rather than specifically a "yellow background" feature**.
For example:
This is ==important text==.
could represent "marked/highlighted text", with the actual appearance determined by the Leanpub theme and output format.
It would be useful if this worked consistently in:
- EPUB
- Leanpub's web reader
For PDF, the default rendering could be a yellow background when color is available, with an appropriate alternative for grayscale or print output.
Since `==text==` is already familiar to users of several Markdown implementations and editors, it would also be easy to write, easy to remember, and remain perfectly readable in the Markua source itself.
CommonMark does not define a native syntax for `<mark>`, but `==text==` has become a fairly common convention among Markdown extensions. It therefore seems like a natural extension for Markua, especially for a markup language designed specifically for writing books.
Would you consider adding this to Markua, possibly as part of the inline/span formatting syntax?
Hi,
has anyone else had a reader message like this? There doesn't appear to be a "Top 10 Featured Discussion Slots" as part of The Seasonal Reading Challenge , and the whole thing smells a bit like a dodgy promotional scam to me.
Hello Sean,
I’m Jennrenee, one of the moderators for The Seasonal Reading Challenge on Goodreads. We are excited to announce that your book, An Applied Guide to Process and Plant Design: Second Edition, has been selected as one of the Top 10 Featured Discussion Slots in our upcoming schedule.
Why Your Work Stands Out
Your book bridges the gap between academic learning and professional practice, offering students and early‑career engineers the kind of insights typically only gained through years of on‑the‑job training. By covering plant layout, spreadsheet tools, AutoCAD, “What If” analysis, and practical case studies, you provide a comprehensive, experience‑driven guide to smarter plant design. This pragmatic approach makes your work uniquely valuable for those entering chemical engineering and process design roles.
As Henry Petroski, the engineer and historian, once said: “Engineering is not only analysis; it is also design.” Your book embodies this principle by showing readers how to move beyond theory into the practical realities of designing safe, efficient, and effective process plants.
Our Audience
We have a highly engaged segment of engineering students, early‑career professionals, and technical leaders who treat featured books not as passive reads, but as interactive frameworks and applied strategies. Your work will be dissected, debated, and applied directly into professional contexts, with members sharing insights as they adapt your design principles to strengthen their own projects.
Your Opportunity
By participating, you’ll be engaging directly with readers who respect your contributions, clear methodology, and practical teaching style. This is a chance to showcase your framework to an advanced audience, observe how readers apply your insights, and build a vocal network of advocates who will champion your book across chemical engineering, plant design, and industrial innovation communities worldwide.
Next Steps
Because these Top 10 slots are highly secured and our calendar is being finalized, we encourage you to respond promptly. We’ll share details, walk you through the feature, and discuss optional enhanced promotional opportunities to maximize your visibility.
Warm regards,
Jennrenee
Moderator, The Seasonal Reading Challenge
Hello,
In my (still unpublished) book, I've two different code blocks back-to-back (because different languages). E.g.: ```rust
// ...
```
```json
{}
```
When rendering the preview I noticed that the vertical space between those two is pretty large. Is there an idiomatic way on how to handle that?
My theme is based on "Technical Condensed" with some small tweaks. all customizations I applied were in the realm of how parts are rendered.
I was doing a check, and I noticed that at some point when I did an update, my table of contents that's being generated is one page off. It starts as soon as page 5. The contents that are actually on page 6 say they're on page 5 in the table of contents, and so on. It never fixes itself in any way. I've tried to do print-ready, and I've tried to publish a new version, but they all keep holding on to an outdated table of contents. How do I get rid of this problem? Thank you.
Currently this feature is not supported, would be really handy if bundle supports adding or removing books so authors can update the bundles to provide updated offers regularly.
A few months ago we announced we were planning audiobook support.
It all went live recently, and we're very excited.
You can now upload and sell audiobooks along with your ebooks, and you can generate and publish an audiobook version right from your Leanpub manuscript.
It's pretty amazing. Find out more in our recent Lean Publishing Tip of the Day post here:
Leanpub Now Supports Audiobooks!
https://leanpub.com/tips/leanpub/16-leanpub-now-supports-audiobooks
There's also a post on our blog:
https://leanpub.com/blog/lean-publishing-tip-of-the-day-leanpub-now-supports-audiobooks
You can learn more about our audiobook support here:
Turn your book into an audiobook
https://leanpub.com/services/audiobook_ai
If you have any questions, please let us know.
Len
The new design for the author’s page is really nice and tidy. It makes the book cover previews much clearer and more comfortable to view. Thanks for the effort!
Recently, we've been experiencing cases of abuse in which people repeatedly purchase, download, and then refund our books. This has been happening frequently, and using our real-time Google Analytics data, we were able to pinpoint the location and report the relevant purchase IDs to Leanpub, but nothing has been done. All the refund timelines are always at the same timestamp so we believe it is a single same abuser.
No reason or comment is provided for these refunds. Instead, dozens of books are refunded in bulk within just a few hours of purchase, every time.
What would you do in this situation? Have you experienced anything similar, and how would you recommend addressing this issue?
Our team has been spending massive effort to help our sourced authors to edit their content into publication ready books. Although we do use AI to help us rephrase sentences and content translation from foreign languages but the effort is tremendous and we need to pay our team salary as well.
Sourcing for authors who can provide us good content, convincing them to work with us is no easy job either. It feels like a ripoff by those abusers as we have no control on the refund process of those intentional abusers.
Sadly, if this goes on, we have to let go of the entire team and don't think we can go on.
I have two authors set for my book. I am set to the primary author and come first in the list. I also have a second author that is not set to primary and is second in the author list. However on the landing page the second none primary author is listed first.
How do I change the ordering and is it possible to have a second author but not have them listed on the landing page?
Hi! I have a genuine active coupon for a bundle, When I click on the link, it'll apply the coupon but pops up a yellow window indicating the coupon is not valid, which could confuse buyers.
It happened on the slug itstrategybundle with the coupon code elevator35.
Thank you!
Although it happens very rarely I'm always please to get reader feedback. But, its as rear as hen's teeth. So to have got two in one week is unheard of.
However, I was already suspicious of the first one, very general, nothing to argue with, almost my own words played back to me "What struck me was..."
Second one has same content-free style.
And the e-mail addresses are fairly anonymous.
I'm thinking these are AI-slop. Anyone else getting them?
Nor do I know why? - but then I don't know why people are creating AI models to commit hack.
Any ideas welcome.
LeanPub: any way we can stop these? - I write for humans so I'm only interested in human feedback
Allan
Hi,
Could I pay for author memberships with PayPal?
OK, I am almost through :-)
It seems when I enable "Show chapter name in page headers", it also shows the book title on the opposite page? It did not use to do that. Is there a new setting that I missed? If the two settings are linked, perhaps just update the description.
It's not critical, I made small fixes to my book an am looking carefully at any differences. Thank you!
Hi everyone - check out this great guest post on the Leanpub blog by Max Guernsey, III:
How to Automate Publishing Chapters in a Serial Novel
https://leanpub.com/blog/how-to-automate-publishing-chapters-in-a-serial-novel
If you're interested in learning more about Max's approach to serial fiction writing and self-publishing, here's a recent Leanpub Podcast episode where we discuss it in detail:
https://leanpub.com/podcasts/leanpub/maxguernseyiii-04-08-26
Len
Hi, I would really appreciate it if we could have metrics showing the Top 10 Book Titles by Sales and the Top 10 Book Titles by Refunds. We manage book publications for multiple authors across a variety of titles, so having these metrics would be very helpful for us in monitoring and evaluating performance. Thank you!
For one of my books (https://leanpub.com/author/book/fastfeedbackusingruby), generating a preview fails when attempting to push changes to Dropbox.
The error/info message is this:
This error occurred during a preview.
[AI Suggestion]
**Category: INFRASTRUCTURE**
This isn't something in your manuscript — it's an internal issue on our side. Our build system encountered a temporary communication problem with Dropbox while trying to sync your project files. Please try building again; these transient network hiccups usually resolve on retry, and our team has been notified of the issue.
Retrying, however, didn't help. I'm getting the same error again.
Generating a PDF preview for another book works fine, though. So I'm wondering what I am missing here…
Hi there,
I have a technical + marketing background and I run my own servers, and agent runtimes, adhering to A2A protocols.
I wanted to drop by and check if anyone here in the author forum has developed or interested in developing an AI assisted workflow for writing, editing, publishing, markeitng and monitoring e-books?
would love to hear from you!
As a follow-up to my previous post:
Where can I edit/se up the Dropbox connection? I can't find it anymore. 😱
When I check the set-up in Dropbox, I see two accounts for the corresponding Dropbox folder (see attached image).
But where can I find the corresponding setting in LeanPub?
It seems that tables with both width and column-width attributes ignore both attributes, unless I am doing something entire wrong. I am pretty sure this used to work and I did not change the tables. Example:
{ width: 100%, column-widths: "25% 25% 50%"}
| Characteristic | Perceived Opposite | Enabling Mechanism |
If I only specify width, the width renders as specified.
I can probably get by for now by removing column-widths, but it'd be great if someone can check. Thank you!
I had not regenerated Platform Strategy in a while, but I fixed a few typos and references. When generating a print-ready PDF, I found that picture vertical spacing has substantially increased. I agree that it looks better, but it causes page breaks to reset, which'd be a lot of work to fix. I set the Figure Vertical Margin to 0 , but it's still bigger than before. Is there a way to have the original narrow margins back for compatibility?
I attached old and new pictures.
I have a footnote reference in a subheading. It used to work fine, but now it's being rendered in the subheading. Source is:
### Why buy it when you can build it?[^using_joke]
Result is attached. Any chance to fix this?
My royalty over $1000 was cancelled this month. I think I missed the wise email. I emailed help 5 days ago no reply.
What to do ?