Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific "Agile", and the rather broad "Software". I wonder whether you might not help browsers discover books of interest, by providing more categories and sub-categories (e.g., distinguish programming from data science, and under programming have separate sub-topics like Javascript, Python, and web).

That's a very good point. Adding to backlog :)

It is nice to see people from the tools we use daily watch Hacker News and actually listen to what we talk about. Thank you and I will be using you guys for my first book on Functional Programming soon!

Great! Brian Marick's book on Functional Programming (https://leanpub.com/fp-oo) has done really well; looking forward to seeing more of them!

I second this. Also you seem to have more erotic/unusual titles...

I think that's because vanity publishing is typically very popular amongst programming and "romance" authors.

We like to think of what we're doing as Lean Publishing (self-published in-progress ebooks), not vanity publishing. We only earn money if the author does, unlike most of the scum that prey on authors who wish to self-publish and spend thousands of dollars to get a box of books that sit in their basement.

The Leanpub workflow is totally free to use, and we're making it better all the time.

Now, frankly, I'm a programming book author myself (I've written 3 programming books) and we have tons of programming books on Leanpub -- but I really wish we had a lot more romance and other "genre" books than we currently do. I even went to Brisbane to speak at GenreCon Australia (http://www.genrecon.com.au/) in 2013 to try to jump-start this, but frankly our usability wasn't there yet. We'll get there.

I've been using Leanpub to write my first ebook doing the "1000 words a day" thing for 2 weeks now. I thought I would see if I've learned enough from running Candy Japan to do a book on subscription boxes.

It's been a really pleasant experience so far, although my chosen topic feels a bit broad, as it encompasses everything from running a website to marketing, shipping, packaging, curation, customer service etc. and it feels difficult to really get too deep into any subject. And the reality is that running such a box by yourself is exactly about being a generalist in all of this stuff.

At this point I have about 60 pages written and am now commissioning a book cover on 99designs: https://en.99designs.jp/book-cover-design/contests/create-e-...

I'm plotting a way to A/B test these covers. Maybe do an ad campaign with 1/6 of traffic getting each cover and see how many email signups each one gets. My leanpub page is looking rather bare now without one: https://leanpub.com/subscription-box

Candy Japan looks very cool.

I went to Leanpub because you commented here and also because OP's book was there. I was interested in seeing what else was out there about Django, but when I searched, only one result came up... and I know there's at least one other one: OP's book.

Any plan for improving the search engine?

Huh, looks like my fault. I was avoiding mentioning Python/Django in favor of emphasizing "web app development" so it didn't look too technical, but I think I went a bit far and forgot to mention them altogether. Whoops. Adding now.

Oops! I hope that fixes the situation, then. I thought it was much more likely that the site had a finicky search engine than there really being only one book related to Django.

Amazon actually doesn't list me for "Django tutorial" even though both keywords are mentioned on my page. It's been driving me nuts!

It looks like Leanpub isn't doing it either -- I guess they're both prioritizing title keywords.

Maybe a subtitle would help? "Hello Web App: Making Your Own Django App" or something.

Yeah... but with non-programmer-y people, "Django App" is worse than "Web App." I'll have to see how things go and change it if it's worth it!

Just want to say that I have two books on Leanpub totalling about 12.000 readers and am extremelly happy with the platform! Big thank you to the Leapub team, you folks rock!

Also working on a LeanPub book that doubles as framework documentation for our company until complete. Love it so much! Thank you!!!

Yay! Leanpub is my top recommendation for anyone self publishing a book, the platform is really great. Hope it gets even bigger!

It seems very geared towards non-fiction. Is there an equivalent for fiction writers or would you recommend going with them for fiction as well? The platform looks excellent but I'm not sure if it's the right fit. I love that they recommend exploring other options (excellent company philosophy)

Fantasy has one entry, scifi has no entries and fiction has a total of three entries.

We want to improve our support for fiction a lot in the months ahead. We're mostly computer programming books right now because Leanpub used to be so hard to use you needed to be a programmer to figure it out :) Most programmers already know Markdown, whereas the idea that you should write in something other than Word is something that we need to explain to people, and that opportunity only comes with traction.

To support fiction properly, we need to add support for paying for instalments, so that you can buy a chapter at a time, etc. Serial fiction used to be a big deal in the 1860s, and it should be a bigger deal now because of the internet.

Also, we're working on a new version of our in-browser editor which will be more friendly for people who don't like writing in Markdown -- which probably includes many fiction authors...

What's wrong with Amazon?