Leanpub Manual
- A dedication is added through your book’s Settings page, and is put before the Table of Contents.
- Adding About the Author text on the Settings page overrides the About You text on your account profile.
- Coupons let you sell your book at a discounted price, or let reviewers get free copies.
- Only e-mail your readers once or twice a month at most.
- Markdown supports almost all the Kramdown extensions, with the exception of HTML blocks and
<<
becoming the left guillemet.
- Attributes should be alone on a line, with blank lines above and below.
- Technical books are on 8.5”x11” paper with inch margins, leaving 6.5”x9” to work with.
- With 300PPI images, an image can be 1950x2700 pixels, while the cover page should be exactly 2550x3300 pixels.
- You can float and align an image on your page by using the
width
and float
attributes.
- Cover images can be in either JPEG or PNG format and must be named
title_page.jpg
or title_page.png
.
- If all your books are in stealth mode, then your profile is also invisible to the public.
- When specifying whether libraries can purchase your book, consider that libraries can lend out an unlimited number of copies of your book without DRM.
- You can add Google Analytics to your landing page.
- Leanpub ignores all
.git
directories, and so you can use a Git repository as your manuscript
directory.
- To add a motto or epigraph to the beginning of a chapter, simply center the text.
Markdown
- An image is inserted by

, or 
to insert without a caption.
- To start a new part in your book, start a line with
-#
followed by the part title.
- Create
frontmatter.txt
, mainmatter.txt
, and backmatter.txt
files that just contain {frontmatter}
, {mainmatter}
, and {backmatter}
.
- Surround text in carets (
^
) to make it superscript.
- Adding two spaces at the end of a paragraph creates separation. This is useful when following a paragraph with another kind of text block.
- You can center text by preceding it with
C>
.
- Once you start a numbered list, it doesn’t matter what number you put at the beginning of the line.
- To put a code block in a list, indent it by 8 spaces, and place a blank line before and after the code block.
- For a definition list, put the thing you want to define on a line by itself, and on the next line precede the definition with a colon (
:
).
- Text in a blockquote is preceded with
>
.
- Text in an aside, or sidebar, is preceded with
A>
.
- In the same style as asides, use
W>
for warnings, T>
for tips, E>
for errors, I>
for information, Q>
for questions, D>
for discussions, and E>
for exercises.
- Create a code block by placing matching numbers of tildes before and after the block.
- You can put code in its own folder, and refer to it with either
<<(code/filename.ext)
or <<[title](code/filename.ext)
.
- To create a link without alternative text, surround the URL in angle brackets (
<
and >
).
- There must be a blank line before and after a footnote definition, and the caret symbol is required.
- Identifiers that you can crosslink to are preceded with
#
and enclosed in curly braces ({
and }
).
- To force a page break, add
{pagebreak}
on a line by itself.
- When defining a table, use vertical bars (
|
) to separate columns; also place bars before the first and after the last column.
- To add more spacing between rows in a table, put a dash lined between them.
- To exclude lines, you can precede the text with two
%
characters.
- To use inline or block LaTeX math, surround the LaTeX with delimiters
{$$}
and {/$$}
.
- Curly quotes are automatically generated from straight quotes in your Markdown.
- A hack to add more space between paragraphs is to add a blank table, defined as
| |
.