Today’s edition covers:

• Video walkthrough of the early UX for the to-be-read and book-tracking app for readers.

• The new book series pages are live!

• Reminder: Sign up for a live Zoom on book marketing basics + Q&A (coming May 10th).

• April roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

Fun Size! 🦥

• NPR has a great breakdown of why most Americans want to read more books and why some are struggling to do so.

• We are up to 2,100+ submissions for the Readers’ Favorite Reads of 2024! Please share your favorites and join the club. If you need any tech support, just let me know 😀.

Video walkthrough of the early UX for the to-be-read and book-tracking app for readers.

Watch the short video walkthrough here.

The new book series pages are live!

I also mentioned this earlier this week, but in case you missed it and want to try those:

• Jack Reacher series, books like the series, and related book lists.

• The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, books like the series, and related book lists.

We found a few bugs we need to fix. Our part-time dev should fix those this week or next. Then, we will start emailing everyone who submitted a series to me 😁. After that, we will add the 6,000+ book series to our system.

🔔Sign up for a live Zoom on book marketing basics + Q&A on Saturday, May 10th

What time on Saturday, May 10th? (Aussie option)

• East Coast - 11 am

• Central - 10 am

• Mountain - 9 am

• West Coast - 8 am

• UK - 4 pm

• 🇦🇺🇳🇿For Aussies and Kiwis, I am doing a separate live Zoom Event. It will be at 4 pm Sydney time or 6 pm Auckland time (on Saturday, May 10th). I look forward to chatting with you; I’ll bring my coffee!

Just reply if you want to be added to the event 😀. I will not record this one, so you have to be there (I might record it in the future, but I think the Q&A part will be questions that are best left private). I will do another one in June as well. 

What will I cover?

My goal is to give you an overview of what you can do to market your book. I am taking everything I’ve learned about book marketing at Shepherd and from the thousands of authors I’ve talked with to distill into the basics.

I will give a 25-minute presentation on the basics, followed by a big Q&A section where you can ask questions.

Here is what I will cover:

• Do you want to do marketing? What is the bare minimum?

• Starting with why: what is your goal for your book & writing career?

• I want to be a full-time author, so what is the rough rule of thumb for achieving that?

• Why is book marketing so hard? How do you overcome these obstacles?

• Shifting your mindset to building fans (with each book).

• The only way to sell books is word of mouth; how do you get that flywheel moving?

• Talk about free marketing and paid marketing options. What can you do?

Then, I will open it up to Q&A to answer any questions you have.

My April Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What are we building now?

• Adding book series pages to Shepherd. (launched!)

• Upgrading our personalized book recommendation email for readers. This change will allow readers to pick the email's frequency and change the variables that go into the generation of the email (book, author, genre, and topic). We need to get this added to roll this out of beta. (75% done)

• A massive upgrade to our bookshelves, which group books around genres, topics, and age groups. (15% done)

What are we building after that?

• We are upgrading our Book Boost perk for Founding authors and adding a paid marketing program for authors who want it (it helps fund us).

• We are revamping our genre and topic system. It needs a significant revamp to improve genre/topic accuracy. We are also working to add themes, tropes, moods, and more!

• Launching our to-be-read and book-tracking tool for readers!

Browse our full roadmap here.

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

• We had 166,000+ visitors.

• We had 12,000+ clicks to bookstore partners this month. 

• Of those, 1,900+ were clicks to an author’s promoted book.

Last year, we had a total of 3.2 million visitors.

Detailed stats on our traffic, clicks, sales, and demographics.

What else is going on?

I took my son to Carcassonne (France) for the weekend. We had a blast exploring the city and doing some nearby hikes. It was good to get out of the city and into nature.

My mom and stepdad are in town for three weeks. We are showing them around Bordeaux and then going on a two-week road trip through part of Ireland. I look forward to it, as I haven’t seen much outside Dublin 😀.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—I listened to this on audiobook with my son. He loved it and laughed a lot! I would have enjoyed it more if I had read it in my teens or twenties. I am not sure how I missed it at that age 😃.

• He Who Fights with Monsters books 1 through 4 - I liked this series, but book 4 got rough and needs some editing. The earth bit of the story just felt like it needed some heavy editing and improvements (it was born on Royal Road and then moved into book format). It was a fun read; if you love LitRPG, you might love it.

• Night Soldiers by Alan Furst - An interesting historical fiction spy thriller from the POV of a young recruit into the NKVD in 1934.

I am reading...

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones—I don’t read much horror, but this sounded intriguing, so I decided to try something new. I am just getting to the juicy part.

• Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It by Ian Leslie - I am researching curiosity, as it is one of Shepherd's foundations and a key element I want to design for.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. Carcassonne France with my son!