Today’s edition covers:

• Shepherd.com is becoming BookDNA.com (same site, new name)

• 2026 is here. What are we building for authors?

• Can you help me with two things?

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

• January roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

Fun Size! 🦥

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

• We now have 5,389 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.

What were your 3 favorite reads of 2025?

Share your 3 favorite reads here (1,180+ authors & readers shared so far).

This is about what you read and loved in 2025, NOT when it was published.

Browse the results here by fiction, nonfiction, and specific genres! 

New feature 📚🧬: You can also see what readers who loved your favorite book or author also loved to read. At the top of the page, just put in one of your favorite books/authors to get matched with readers who share your Book DNA.

Shepherd.com is becoming BookDNA.com (same site, new name)

Hi 😀 

I hope you had a great holiday!

We will soon be switching the website from Shepherd.com to BookDNA.com. I’ve been thinking about this shift for most of 2025. After talking with readers, I decided that "Book DNA" better reflects what we have built and are continuing to build. 

The site itself is not changing. Your account, data, and experience will remain exactly the same. Only the name and URL are changing.

I’ve got an FAQ here if you have any questions.

I will let you know when it changes.

Thanks, Ben

2026 is here. What are we building for authors?

2024 and 2025 were wild.

The internet is changing, and we have to change with it.

What two things have changed?

Google has given up on its search engine, stuffed it with even more ads, and shifted to ranking only the largest websites ahead of independent publications. We are better off than most independent websites because of our size, but we have lost 70% of our traffic from Google. And given Google’s monopoly, that is a huge hit. This is affecting every website you can imagine, and one recent report found that 400 independent news publications have lost 50%+ of their traffic from Google. Google is no longer helping people find good content and has destroyed how the web works.

At the same time, Google has shifted towards AI and is giving AI-generated answers within search results instead of helping readers find a website. Even worse, they are scraping our websites and stealing our content to generate those answers. And we have no legal recourse given their power/monopoly. Some cases are winding their way through the legal system, but Google can afford to throw hundreds of lawyers that even large companies can’t overcome.

What is the good news?

In 2025, we had over 2.2 million readers use us to find a new book. We still get a lot of traffic directly from other search engines and websites, and Google still sends us a big chunk of traffic.

How has this new reality changed our plans?

It is clear that the web publishing model is dead, and our only way forward is to build a direct relationship with readers through a desktop and mobile app.

Our core mission is to help readers find books they will love in fun and unique ways. And do that while helping authors connect with readers who might be interested in their book. How do we deliver that within an app?

The best way to figure that out is to talk to your future users 😀 

In 2025, I spoke with hundreds of readers to understand what they wanted and tested different mockups and ideas on them. I tapped into two themes:

• Readers want a private space to log what they want to read, what they read, and how they felt about those books. They don’t want a giant social network publicly sharing their entire reading history. They want ownership/control.

• Readers want deeply personalized book recommendations that help them find books they love and don’t know about. It was good to confirm our core thesis again and dig into it more 😃.

With that in mind, what are we building over the next 2 years?

We’re building a smarter, more private way to track what you want to read, what you read, and how you feel about it, and deeply personalized book recommendations (like Pandora or Spotify for books).

If you want to help us test this new app, apply here!

Our app will be free for all readers, with a $50/year pro plan for power readers with some special features. We are building the beta now and should be ready for the first user tests in February. After that, we will learn, add features, and aim to publicly launch in late 2026.

If you want to see a video preview of the beta so far, go here.

How will this help authors?

Imagine if Goodreads actually helped authors.

Goodreads receives 10 to 20 million visitors a month, yet does jack shit for authors who want to connect with their fans, meet new readers, or anything innovative.

We want to help authors, and everything we build takes into account how we can help authors with 3 things:

1. Reach your most likely readers: You shouldn’t have to pay to get your book in front of the right readers. We connect your book with the readers most likely to love it, and in a way that builds real interest in you and your book.

2. More publicity for trending books: When your book has that magical spark with readers, we help that momentum grow. We want to help more readers discover new books and authors they will love.

3. Grow/connect with your fan base: As we grow, we want to make it easier for you to collect, grow, and tap into your fan base. This is my biggest frustration with Goodreads, and I am going to work my ass off to make it better for authors.

This is not going to happen overnight; this is the start. 😀 

Will you join us on this adventure?

Right now, we are laser-focused on building an app that readers love to use.

Once we are on a path to reaching 50,000 readers using our app each month, we can start adding more and more features for authors. And zipping together all the website features into the app.

What do we desperately need for this journey?

We need your financial support; we need authors who are willing to pay the price of one fancy coffee a month to become members and build a better book platform. We have some great perks, and I hope you will consider joining our adventure.

I work for free, and 100% of our income goes toward our small development team building this platform and our server costs. Hit me up if you have any questions, I’m having to jump on a Zoom as well.

Can you help me with two things?

Can you recommend a service to manage pay-per-click ads on Amazon or Facebook for authors?

I would love to get your recommendations. I’ve had a few authors ask me for a freelancer or service that can set up and manage ads for their books.

Just hit reply or email me at [email protected].

If you use Goodreads, Storygraph, or a similar book tracker, would you be interested in helping me test our new app?

How is our app different? It is a private space to track what you read and what you liked, and to get personalized book recommendations based on your Book DNA. We are not a giant social network where your reading habits are public.

If you are interested, please sign up here 😀.

☎️ 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 the cost of one fancy coffee drink a year, and everything we raise goes toward our mission to help authors and readers (I work for free).

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

My January Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What did we finish and ship?

• Every year, we ask thousands of readers (and authors) to share their 3 favorite reads of the year. Now you can enter a book/author you love and see what books readers loved who also loved that book/author (your Book Twins). Try it here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 (100% done)

What are we working on?

• 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 beta in February. We are currently building a full book database, frontend components, and backend logic. (60% done)

• We are migrating from the domain Shepherd.com to BookDNA.com. Nothing will change except the URL/Name and FAQ here. (10% done).

• We are upgrading our Book Boost perk to improve the ad format for authors and launch the “new book” perk for our members (70% done).

• Holding: 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 Book Boost perk upgrade.

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 147,000+ visitors.

• We had 10,400+ clicks to bookstore partners this month. 

• Of those, 1,400+ were clicks to an author’s promoted book.

Last year, we had 2.2 million visitors.

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

What else is going on?

Winter is mostly for work, as I struggle to get outside. I end up biking and working out indoors and feeling a bit trapped. We have some fun planned for this coming weekend as we are taking my son up into the mountains to meet the snow. He was born in Colorado, but he can’t remember snow, so it will be fun to introduce him to it. 😀

What am I reading?

I am reading...

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer: This is part of my deep dive into the rise of Fascism I’ve been doing over the last few years. I love history, and I thought I knew a lot about this period, but this book has been far more detailed than any of my previous studies. I am enjoying it immensely. I just finished a chapter on the Weimar Republic, the rise of propaganda/opinion “newspapers,” and the daily editions that barely touched upon the truth. Reading about how the far-right newspapers would attack politicians with very little truth felt a bit dark, given our modern world. It didn’t seem like politicians or society in those areas had any recourse, as the libel and defamation laws were weak and ineffective.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. My son turned 9 years old and is very excited about his waffle maker 😀