r/selfpublishing • u/Dear_Key8053 • 7d ago

Publishing in leanpub vs Amazon kindle

I have a manuscript I’m trying to publish, it’s on Olympiad mathematics. The reason I’m considering leanpub is because there’s the feature of “pay what you want”
Since the audience of the book is highschool students I think that would be helpful for them. However it’s not a well known website so maybe some people wouldn’t want to buy from it or it has some issues idk

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u/dothemath_xxx 7d ago

Do you have an existing audience who will be looking to buy the book, who you are already in contact with?

If yes, you can publish it pretty much wherever you want. If no, then you need to put the book where people will actually find it, i.e. a marketplace that already comes with a large built-in audience, like Amazon.

But you could potentially publish to both; as long as you're not specifically enrolling in the KU/KDP Select program, there's no requirement of exclusivity when publishing on Amazon.

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u/nico_parola 6d ago

Two things about Leanpub that aren't obvious from the outside:

PWYW there isn't "pay anything". You set a minimum price and a suggested price, and the slider defaults to the suggested one — so you can keep the floor low enough for a student and still have most people pay the number you actually want. That's the fix for the race-to-the-bottom worry above.

The one that matters more for your book though is math on Kindle. Reflowable files handle equations and diagrams badly, so heavy LaTeX usually ends up as images of formulas that blur or shrink depending on the reader's font size. Leanpub hands people a PDF alongside the EPUB, and for an Olympiad book that's not a small detail — a lot of your readers will want to print pages and work the problems on paper. Leanpub also pushes free updates to everyone who already bought, which is genuinely useful for a problem book, because you will find mistakes in your solutions.

I'd publish both, like the others said. Just run the Kindle file through Kindle Previewer before deciding which one is the "main" edition, and see whether you can live with how the math comes out.