Partner Program

In June 2023, Leanpub is launching a Partner Program, in which carefully-selected Partners can resell Leanpub books, bundles, courses and tracks via their own websites.

All Leanpub books, bundles, courses and tracks are opted in to our Partner Program by default. However, the primary author can opt out on the Pricing page for books, bundles, courses and tracks.

The launch Partner for our Partner Program is Learnerbly, a company which provides learning content to corporate clients with training budgets. Obviously, there are a great many Leanpub books and courses which would be an excellent fit for them, and we are excited about this partnership.

We’re going to start small, and launch on Learnerbly with about 40 Leanpub books. No bundles, courses or tracks will be included at launch. Also, we will be launching with multiple-use free coupons, since this does not require any custom programming.

If the launch proves successful, we hope to grow the partnership from there, adding more books (and possibly bundles, courses or tracks) and adding single-use coupons created via our API.

Here’s how this will work:

  1. Partner websites will be able to resell Leanpub books, bundles, courses and tracks which Leanpub has chosen to make available to the partner website, and which have not opted out of the Partner Program. The list of which books, bundles, courses and tracks are provided to a given partner will be updated roughly once per month, so if you opt out there may be a period of time of up to a month before your book, bundle, course or track is taken down from the partner website.
  2. The price paid on the partner website for the book, bundle, course or track will be the suggested price on Leanpub. The partner website will only update the suggested price used roughly once per month, so there will be a period of time when the partner website can sell a Leanpub book, bundle, course or track at an outdated price.
  3. If the book has multiple packages, the default package will be the one selected. (Otherwise, it would be too confusing for the customers.)
  4. Your book, bundle, course or track will earn 80% royalties, just like any normal Leanpub purchase.
  5. These Partner sales are done via multiple-use free coupons created by Leanpub, or (later) via single-use coupons created by the API. (What will happen is that initially we will use a multiple-use coupon with a new partner, but we expect to build API integrations with partners so that they can create single-use coupons via our API.)
  6. Once a month, Leanpub will invoice the Partner for the sales which were made via the free coupons, checking the number of coupons used against the purchase records of the Partner via their website, and using the records of the Partner in the case of a discrepancy. (With multiple-use coupon codes, there is always the possibility of coupon code sharing, and the Partner should not be liable if a coupon is overused. This is why the multiple-use coupon codes are a first step, and unique single-use coupon codes which are created via our API will replace them with various partners over time.)
  7. Leanpub will typically be paid Net 15 by Partners, meaning that (unless there is an issue) we will be paid in the same month that we invoice a Partner. So, unless there is an issue, Partner Program royalties will be paid in a similar timeframe to normal Leanpub royalties. However, the royalties will be initially tracked and paid via separate payments, which will also be done monthly. The payment method for normal royalties (PayPal or Wise) will be used for the royalties from Partner sales. In 2024 we expect to combine the royalties from normal Leanpub sales, the Partner Program and the Royalty Pool (for purchases of books which are only free with membership) into a combined royalty payment with an itemized breakdown.

To be clear: just because the primary author has not opted out of the Partner Program does NOT mean that Leanpub will provide the book, bundle, course or track to various partners. We will be automatically excluding mature content, and we will also use our judgment here. There are tens of thousands of books on Leanpub, and we are starting small. Providing content to partners will initially be a manual process involving emailing an Excel spreadsheet containing lists of URLs of books to include, their suggested prices and a free multiple-use coupon for each of them. Over time, more of this will be automated, of course.

If you are a Leanpub author or a potential Leanpub Partner and you have any questions about our Partner Program, please email [email protected].