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How to self-publish a paperback novel, that is. Looks like a lot of good advice! For my use case (self-publishing a digital-only book): I wrote "Learn Java th
by teach 10y ago
How to self-publish a paperback novel, that is. Looks like a lot of good advice!
For my use case (self-publishing a digital-only book):
I wrote "Learn Java the Hard Way" using Leanpub and I was pleased with the experience, but their build tools are closed-source and sort-of creaky and the tweak-compile-preview cycle is WAY too slow for my workflow.
I intend to use Softcover for my next one.
Recently I switched to Gumroad for fulfillment and I have been incredibly happy with them. Highly recommended.
- onion2k 10y agoI'm writing a technical book at the moment and looking at a couple of ways to get it to print. Is there a particular reason why you're looking at Softcover, or is just "better than Leanpub"?
- thewhitetulip 10y agoI have published two tech books on leanpub, if you like markdown then leanpub is great. Earlier it used to be free, but now they charge 99$ for carrying a book, their rates are awesome, you get something like 90% of tge book sales
- teach 10y agoFor the record I didn't publish on Leanpub. (Well, I did but I didn't send many customers their way.) I just used them to get a nice-looking PDF and sold it myself from my website using Stripe to accept credit cards.
- thewhitetulip 10y agoHow much does Strip charge you for transactions? Is it cheaper than Leanpub?
- teach 10y agoStripe is quite a bit cheaper: 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card charge.
- teach 10y agoI'm very particular about how I want certain parts of the book to work, and with Leanpub there was a lot of random tweaking of Leanpub-flavored Markdown to try to please the parser. I'd change a thing, press build, wait 9 minutes and check to see if that fixed it. In particular, woe is me if I wanted to use a mathematical formula. I like that with Softcover I can use a local build system and can fall back to LaTeX (well, PolyTeX) to give me much better control.
- onion2k 10y agoGood to know. Thanks.
- zhubert 10y agoDoes Gumroad have a solution for VAT? That was one of the things that lead me to use Amazon instead. Happy to update the post with alternatives.
- fundamental 10y agoI've currently got one product up on Gumroad and they seem to add VAT to the overall cost in countries which use it. I did end up getting a few complaints from customers about their lack of handling VAT IDs though.
- vram22 10y ago>Does Gumroad have a solution for VAT? Not the person you asked, and haven't tried the feature out myself, but saw this a while ago: How We’re Handling VAT at Gumroad: http://blog.gumroad.com/post/110080508463/vat http://blog.gumroad.com/post/110080508463/vat Here is an excerpt from that page: [ We’ve talked a lot in the past about how we approach building Gumroad: We ask ourselves what creators are spending time on that isn’t making things, and then we figure out how to do those things for them. We are tackling VAT in the same way. Going forward, this is what creators on Gumroad need to do to properly handle VAT for their digital products: Go back to making awesome stuff. In other words, we’re on it. Gumroad will collect VAT as required and remit it to the EU. You won’t need to fill out any forms, register for anything, or send anything out. Your (EU-based) customers, will see (and pay) the added VAT on their purchases. ] :)