CourseAI: Create a Course from Your Leanpub Book with AI-created Quizzes and Exercises and optional Video Interviews, and Unlock Corporate Training Budget Revenue

Turn Your Book Into a Premium-Priced Training Course — Without Lifting a Finger

Your book could already be priced 5x to 10x more than it is right now. The secret? Corporate training budgets.

Companies happily pay hundreds of dollars for a single course that trains their team. They’ll reimburse employees for courses, not books, and they expect a certificate of completion.

If your book teaches something valuable, it can (and should) also be a course. That’s exactly why Leanpub added courses to our platform years ago.

Problem is, you needed to do a bunch of manual work to turn your book into a course, creating lessons, quizzes, exercises, and all the supporting materials.

Until now.

This is exactly what CourseAI does for you.

From Book to Revenue-Boosting Course

We take your existing Leanpub book and transform it into an online course, complete with lessons, quizzes, exercises, automated marking, and a certificate of completion for your learners.

Even better, with CourseAI Max, we even record hours of professionally produced course videos where Leanpub co-founder Len Epp interviews you, adding a human touch that motivates learners and justifies additional premium pricing.

Typical turnaround: about 1-2 weeks for CourseAI Standard and Pro, about 2-4 weeks for CourseAI Max.

60-Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

If you’re not thrilled with your course, we’ll fully refund you — even though you keep the course. No fine print. No risk. Just results.

Three Professional Packages — One Perfect Fit for You

Whether you want to turn your book into a course with lightning speed, polish it to professional perfection, or create a premium learning experience that commands top-tier pricing, CourseAI has a package built for you.

Every option uses AI to transform your book into a complete course with lessons, quizzes, exercises, and automated marking. The difference is how much personal attention and human craftsmanship you want us to add.

From our streamlined Standard service, to the concierge-level Pro package, to the all-out Max experience with professionally produced videos, each tier is designed to help you reach more learners, win corporate training budgets, and do it all with zero hassle.

Choose your book. Pick your package. We’ll handle the rest.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Who Is This For?

This service is for authors who want Leanpub to produce a course from their books, complete with quizzes, exercises and automated marking.

What Book Formats are Supported?

CourseAI works with books written in Leanpub Flavoured Markdown, Markua 0.10 or 0.30. If your book is in Leanpub Flavoured Markdown or Markua 0.10, we will convert it to Markua 0.30 for you as part of the service.

How Long Does It Take?

The CourseAI service typically takes about 1-2 weeks for CourseAI Standard or CourseAI Pro, and about 2-4 weeks for CourseAI Max.

Due to the nature of the service, we can't guarantee a specific turnaround time, but we will either deliver the finished product or give you a progress update within two weeks.

Why Did We Build This?

We built CourseAI for the following reason: many Leanpub books are already basically courses, and many more can be easily adapted into courses.
Most importantly, making your book into a course helps you and your learners:

Your learners can often get paid by their employers to take courses on company time, but not to sit around and read books.
Your learners can get a certificate of completion for taking your course, which they can use to show their employer that they have learned the material.
You can, and should, charge more for a course than for a book, since you're pricing it for corporate training budgets. (Frankly, if a company is paying for someone to take a course on company time, they would probably be happier with the course costing $299 or $499 than $29 or $49. This way they are reassured that the course is high quality and worthy of the employee taking it at least partially on company time.)

Leanpub exists to serve our authors. We want to help you reach as many readers and learners as possible, and we want to help you make as much money as possible. We also want to help you save time, so you can spend more time writing and less time doing other things.
So, just as Leanpub automates the process of creating a PDF and EPUB ebook from your book manuscript, and automates the process of producing a print-ready PDF, we also wanted to automate the process of creating a course from your book.
We've always tried to give our authors even more than what they get from a traditional publisher: a better royalty rate, more royalties overall, more control, more flexibility, etc. Now, with our AI services, we can go even further: more translations (with TranslateAI) and more course creation (with CourseAI).

How Does It Work?

You just click a button, and Leanpub takes care of everything else.
1. Leanpub will create a new course for you in Plain Text Editor mode.
2. Leanpub will create a new book in your account. This book will be in Plain Text Editor mode, and it will be in stealth mode. This book will be a private copy of your original book. Here, we will make any needed modifications to the structure of your book, so that your book is structured in a way that works for CourseAI. (For example, while books can have parts, courses do not: they just have lessons, which correspond to the chapters of a book.)
3. The original book authors are set as the course authors (with the same royalty percentages).
4. We set all the relevant settings for your course based on your book settings.
5. Your course is put into read-only mode.
6. Leanpub will use Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 via its API to produce your course. This involves sending your entire book for Claude to read, after which the AI will create quizzes and exercises for your course. We then validate this material.
7. Every chapter that isn't in the frontmatter or backmatter will turn into a lesson.
8. The sections and subsections in each chapter will be sections and subsections in each lesson.
9. Every lesson with testable material will have one quiz.
10. Every lesson with testable material will have at least one exercise. For longer lessons, we add multiple exercises throughout the lesson.
11. Each exercise and quiz will both be proportional in size to the contents that created it. Longer chapters will produce longer lessons with longer quizzes.
12. Leanpub will preview your course, and will ensure the course preview successfully generates.
13. Leanpub will take your course out of read-only mode.
14. Leanpub will produce a cover for your course in Photoshop, based on your book cover.
15. CourseAI Pro and Max only: Leanpub will take your course as a student, to ensure the quality of the output, both in terms of ensuring that the questions are good and ensuring that a student can successfully complete the course and get a certificate.
16. CourseAI Max only: We will send you a link to a Calendly page to book your Leanpub interviews with Len Epp. Typically we need 3 sessions of about 1 hour each. We do the video editing, and we add the videos to your course for you.
17. Leanpub will email you to let you know your course is ready.
At this point, you can unpublish the CourseAI course if you want to manually edit it yourself.
Unlike TranslateAI, CourseAI is not a fully-automated process. We do use Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 via its API, but we still do some manual editorial and QA work with CourseAI Pro and Max: not only do we publish your course, we also take it as a student to ensure the quality of the output, both in terms of ensuring that the questions are good and ensuring that a student can successfully complete the course and get a certificate.
When you click the button to purchase CourseAI, we produce an online course from your book manuscript, complete with quizzes, exercises, automated marking and a certificate of completion for learners who pass the course. The CourseAI process typically completes in about 2-3 weeks, and you get an email when it's done. We even generate a cover for your course, based on your book cover.
With CourseAI Pro and Max, Leanpub will email you to request permission to publish your course for you. However, you may want to review the quizzes and exercises we produced for you. If you want to make any changes, you can just do that right in the in-browser editor (or give us the feedback directly), and then click a button to publish a new version of your course.

Is There Any Indication on the Course that CourseAI was Used?

By default, we add the following note to your Course Info section on your course landing page:
"This course is based on the book (your book title, with a link to your book landing page). It was generated from the book using CourseAI."
You can remove this note if you don't want to indicate that CourseAI was used.
You can see an example of what this note looks like on the following courses:

The course is published under your name, and the course authors are set as the original book authors, with the same royalty percentages.

How Does CourseAI Work with Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2?

When we produce a course from a book we split the book into chapters, and then into multiple chunks within those chapters. Not only are most book manuscripts much too large to fit in the working memory or "context window" of Claude, but there are also quality benefits from keeping the length of a chunk to a manageable size. So, we split the chapters into appropriately-sized chunks, and we process those chunks to produce quizzes and exercises. This all happens automatically, and at every step along the way we output files so that we can observe the process happening and detect any errors which occurred. Watching this process occur as the CourseAI jobs run is truly amazing: we really do live in the future!
We're also better at detecting and correcting any errors which exist after the course generation is complete. We take the course as students, so the CourseAI process also includes a manual human QA pass at the end.

Why Is CourseAI Expensive?

CourseAI is expensive. This is for two reasons:

It's expensive for us to deliver, because (especially with Pro and Max) we do manual work before and after the automated course creation. There is automation here, but there is also human work with considerable judgment.
The value from CourseAI is arguably the highest: we expect that some of our authors will earn tens of thousands of dollars from CourseAI courses. Courses should be priced 5x to 10x the price of the equivalent book, since they can be bought with corporate training budgets. Frankly, if you don't think that you'll earn more than the cost of CourseAI in royalties from the course that CourseAI produces, you shouldn't use it! If you can, however, this means that the cost of CourseAI would be entirely paid by the additional royalties you'll earn, so it's a no-brainer to use it. <em>You click a button and earn a profit</em>.

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earned over $14 million writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

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