Today’s edition covers:

• New feature: Favorite Reads of 2025 will soon be personalized and boost the discovery of your books. (Plus, it delights readers)

• 🎥 Video overview of Book DNA beta build so far.

• Anonymous questions from authors.

• Need book marketing help? Let’s do a Zoom!

• December roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

Fun Size! 🦥

• Written Word media’s 2025 Indie author survey is out. And they have a podcast about the results here. I always enjoy reading through these.

• An interesting article from the Guardian exploring why books explode overnight and if there is a formula for it (hint, there isn’t).

• We now have 5,174 book series published on the website, and we are working to add thousands more. If you want us to add your book series, please email [email protected], and we will bump it to the top of the list.

Reminder: Share your 3 favorite reads of 2025 and get extra promotion for your book!

Submit your picks here and get a beautiful page to share with friends and fans. Plus, we give you a referral link, and any reader who signs up will have your book featured on their page in a special spot under their 3 picks.

Plus, this feeds into our big explore page, which helps all authors (and receives 250,000+ visitors each winter)—details on how this helps you promote your book here.

The Favorite Reads of 2025 will soon be personalized and boost the discovery of your books.

Soon, we will add a new feature to our Favorite 3 Reads of 2025 that lets readers select a book they love and be matched with other readers who also loved it.

For example, if a reader says they also loved The Hive, it will show them what books those readers also picked and link to their 3 favorite reads list to connect with them. We will show authors first to help them reach new readers.

We aim to ship this soon, but we are still working to improve the UX and design, and to address some bugs. I will share it with you as soon as it is ready to test.

🎥 Video overview of Book DNA beta build so far.

I’ve got a 3-minute walkthrough of how our Book DNA app is progressing. We are on track to start testing with a small group of users in late January.

(or watch it here: https://youtu.be/BUMJ6uLNfjM)

Want to help us test? Join here as an early beta tester.

Anonymous questions from authors.

Don’t forget, you can anonymously ask Ben a question, and he will answer it in the next newsletter.

Just one question this month, here it is 😀 

Question: Without saying "everyone is different," could you comment on how you think authors should measure their success, especially after their initial goal is met? As an example, I set out to sell 400 of my debut. Now I've sold 440. That's great, but maybe my initial goal was too low. What marketing methods, beyond a newsletter, can help someone like me keep books moving, however slowly? I ask because I think many of us get stuck, however happily, after the initial launch. And I am happy!

My thoughts:

You hit your goal! That is fantastic, and I am glad you are happy 🙂.

I would be wary about moving the goalposts after the fact. I tend to get nervous when I reach a goal and start worrying I didn’t aim high enough. Maybe you share this tendency? I am not sure it is the healthiest of habits. Sometimes it is good to celebrate, and if you need a new goal, create one for “part 2” of what you want to achieve with that book.

The harder question that impacts all of this is, what is your goal as an author?

• Do you want to create a full-time career as an author?

• Do you want it to be a fun hobby that also covers a car payment?

• Do you just want readers to be reading it?

• Or, do you want to write and create purely for fun?

You might not know, but this really changes my answer (and this is often the first question I ask on calls with authors).

If you want to be a full-time author, my focus is on how you can gather your fans, engage them, and get them excited about your next books. I believe it is the single greatest thing you can do to impact your future success (with some nuance depending on where you write).

Beyond a newsletter, what can help you keep selling books?

I think there are ultimately two powerful forces that drive sales of your books (and they are closely linked).

#1: Word of mouth

This is the most powerful marketing method for books. If your book delights a reader, who tells their friends, and that pattern keeps repeating, your book will keep selling. Your book needs to resonate enough that readers want to tell others about it.

For example, I love Christian Cameron’s books, and I’ve read every single one. I tell readers like me about them, and I’ve bought them as gifts for many of my friends.

#2: Your fan base

If your books create fans, you can do quite a lot, even if your fan base isn’t huge. But you need to collect them so that you can engage with them, and get their help in spreading your books even further (not to mention the cool stuff authors are doing with direct sales and other goodies for fans).

Everything else you do is meant to create fans and increase the speed of word-of-mouth marketing.

What are those things?

• Write the next book (feed your fans, and keep growing so that your future fans can meet you). Even better is a series that pulls your fans into a recurring character and world they fall in love with.

• Your newsletter is to gather, excite, and harness your fans.

• Creating a list on Shepherd so we can help more readers find you within our platform (we are not Oprah, slow and steady exposure that is free for authors).

• Paid advertising on Amazon, Facebook, or Bookbub. Such a hard place to achieve a good ROI.

• Newsletter swaps with other authors (or other sources).

• Social media (this takes a major time investment)

• Building your own long-term channel (this takes a major time investment)

• Earned media (not a fit for most authors)

• Podcasts and other media sources (not a fit for most authors)

Each of the above has about 10 pages of details and nuance on whether it is right for you, your goals, and your genre(s).

I hope that helps. Let’s jump on a Zoom to discuss the nuanced path that is best for you.

☎️ Need book marketing help? Let’s talk!

Recently, I’ve talked with authors about the following…

• Reviewed their Amazon listing for what could be improved

• Reviewed their book cover and how that fits in with their genre

• Talked about possible outside-the-box book marketing they could be doing

• Reviewed book marketing options and what is/isn’t working

• Talk about pay-per-click ads on Amazon and Facebook, and what to try

• I walked them through the full-reader app we are building and how that will help authors in the long term.

• Explained how aspects of Shepherd work and answered questions they have about the different formats.

This is one of many perks for members; membership is only $50 a year, and everything we raise goes toward our mission to help authors and readers.

Once you sign up for a membership, you can schedule a time 😀.

My December Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What did we finish and ship?

• We shipped several updates to improve the ad targeting of our Book Boost perk and the beta of our paid ad setup. This improves how we match Shepherd page content to ads. (100% done)

What are we working on?

• We are adding a personalization feature for our “favorite 3 reads of the year” program. Readers can select one of their favorite books, see who else liked it, view their lists, and browse related books. (90% done).

• Phase 1 of our full reader app (like Goodreads but smarter and deeply personalized). This is a massive project, and we are working to launch the MVP. We are currently building a full book database, frontend components, and backend logic. (50% done)

• We are upgrading our Book Boost perk to improve the ad format for authors and launch the “new book” perk for our members (50% done).

• We are improving our books-like engine (75% done). I’ll share more on this as we finish this work. It is paused until we complete the upgrade of the Book Boost perk.

What are we building after that?

• The bulk of our time will be focused on improving the MVP of our full reader app as we work toward a public launch! This also includes revamping our genre and topic system. It needs a significant revamp to improve genre/topic accuracy.

Browse our full roadmap here.

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

• We had 198,000+ visitors.

• We had 9,800+ clicks to bookstore partners this month. 

• Of those, 1,300+ were clicks to an author’s promoted book.

Last year, we had 3.2 million visitors.

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

What else is going on?

Fall is here! It is rainy, cold, and sliding toward Winter. My son and I are trying to get my wife to let us put up our Christmas tree now, as the more Christmas trees, the better.

Beyond that, I had some “fun” dental surgery, but I am slowly recovering and looking a little less like a chipmunk every day. I look forward to eating non-pureed food for every meal 😁.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• The last book in the Sun Eater series was a fantastic read. This is one of the best science fiction series I’ve read in many years. It is huge in scope, philosophical, and gripping. I’m looking forward to the author's next work.

• Genghis: Birth of an Empire by Conn Iggulden. This was my pick for our family book club, and it was a great read. I’m looking forward to talking with my brother and dad about it, and I might read the next book in the series.

I am reading...

• The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple. William is one of my favorite authors and had a massive impact on me in my youth with his book From The Holy Mountain. I’ve just started this book, but I am already learning so much about a region of the world that I don’t know enough about (and want to remedy).

• Watership Down by Richard Adams: I’ve wanted to read this for the longest time and finally picked it up. It is fantastic, and I am about 30% of the way through.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. The stuff of dreams from my summer bike trip in Switzerland. I wasn’t able to ride it, but one day…