Just before I published my first book, Exponential Happiness, my publisher, LeanPub, honored me with a feature on their podcast for authors. We had quite a long chat, but it is pretty interesting if I may say so myself.

Len Epp is Leanpub’s co-founder. During his interview, we discussed:

• My background
• The Rotary summer camp that changed my life
• My youth exchange year abroad in Germany
• My parents’ activism for the rights of people with disabilities and their families
• My time in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan where I established a network for journalists
• My brief high-rise construction career in India
• My eventual return to Germany
• My book (of course!)
• My experience as a self-published author

You can find the full transcript and show notes on the LeanPub Frontmatter Podcast website.

You can also listen to the full episode here:

About LeanPub

LeanPub is a digital-first platform for authors to get published fast. By their own words:

Leanpub is the combination of two things: a powerful ebook and course writing platform and an online storefront where you can buy our authors’ ebooks and courses.

When I was writing my first book, I saw two significant challenges:

1. how to approach and structure the content of the book
2. the mechanics of getting the book from my computer into a reader’s hands

Any author should be more focused on the first point than on the second. With LeanPub, I found a way to keep m focus on my writing and not be stressed about delivering the final product.

By writing my book in markdown, a lightweight markup language with plain-text-formatting syntax, where simple things like # make a heading and **bold** makes the output bold, I was able to create documents that LeanPub could turn in to a published book. I even used bitbucket for version controlling of the book.

LeanPub generously offers its authors to take the reader-ready files to any outlet for sale without any claim of ownership. Of course, you can buy the book on LeanPub in digital format, but I also could deliver the same files to Amazon to sell the book there in both the paperback and Kindle editions.

Learn more about LeanPub and how you can self-publish a book here.

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