Today I share...

1. Shepherd's membership pitch

2. What new features are we building?

3. An early mockup of genre and age filters

4. The pain of organizing book genre data

5. Traffic for September

6. Ben’s life updates and reading list

By the way, Len Epp invited me to the Leanpub podcast to talk about Shepherd. You can listen here if you are interested. 

We talk about...

• My entrepreneur origin story and how that led to Shepherd

• The long-term goal for Shepherd and its impact on the world.

• How we use machine learning and natural language processing for book discovery (and what we hope to do in the future).

• How I aim to imbue “search” with personal meaning.

• How I am handling tricky subjects like abortion, white supremacy, anti-vax...

• And more!

Shepherd's membership pitch

I started Shepherd because I love to read. As I've gotten to know more authors, I realize they're all looking for ways to sell their books that don't leave them at the mercy of the biggest retailers and won't put them in the poor house. 

What does Shepherd offer authors?

• It puts your book in front of readers who are a perfect match for your book.

• It shares your passion, expertise, and voice, which increases interest in you and your book.

• It's a data-driven methodology with a very transparent founder (me).

• It's 100% free to authors and readers. 

• More great features are coming for authors.

If you're interested, I've got details here on the perks for authors. 

100% of your membership goes toward new features.

My goal is to hire a full-time developer in 2023. Currently, we work with a fantastic part-time developer named Marton. My goal is to hire a full-time developer in addition to Marton. This would allow us to speed up the development of new features.

Imagine what we can do with 1.5 developers, given what we have accomplished with 0.5 :).

Although we're early in our development, we've gotten supportive feedback from thousands of readers and authors. I believe together, we can create a platform that makes browsing for books fun again! With that goal in mind, I humbly ask for your support to help me continue developing Shepherd.

What do you think? Is this a good pitch? Please hit reply and let me know!

What new features are we building?

We are interviewing part-time frontend developers over the coming weeks. 

If we can find someone suitable, our current part-time developer could focus on the backend while the new part-time developer works on the frontend. If this works, it could mean that we could ship new features faster. 

I am unsure how I will squeeze this into the budget, but I will make it work. 100% of the new Founding Members program goes toward this work (and my goal of hiring a full-time developer in 2023).

What are we working on now?

Book editions (4 weeks)

We are working now to add the concept of book editions to our backend systems. This feature will take four weeks to build. We need this feature to improve our data quality, which we need for the next batch of features. 

Automated book creation (4 weeks)

After that, we will automate 90% of book creation. Right now, everything is created manually. This feature will make our book grooming team more efficient; plus, we need it for the next batch of features. This feature will take four weeks to build. 

After that?

I am bummed that these two features will take eight weeks. This delays the start of our work on the individual book pages, “books like” pages, “book lists this book appears on” pages, and the new “explore this book” feature. And it pushes back the genre and age group pages and filters. But, if we can find the right part-time frontend developer, we can speed that up. 

Fingers crossed! 🤞

An early mockup of genre and age filters

I can't wait to have genre and age group data in Shepherd. Once we do, in addition to creating pages, we will also add filters to the website. 

This will make it easy to... 

Go to the World War 2 bookshelf and see only historical fiction. 

Go to the dragon bookshelf and see only kids' books. 

Go to the artificial intelligence bookshelf and see only new science fiction books. 

Here is a very early look…

The pain of organizing book genre data...

I’ve started working on the real-world testing of genre and age group data we get from publishers. It is a lot of banging my head on walls and moaning softly.

I am 99% sure that I will make my genres and then map them to the industry standards (Thema and Bisac).

Why?

Ultimately I want to handle a more diverse array of genres than Bisac and Thema allow. Bisac and Thema are a bit boring IMO. They will help us seed the data, but ultimately I want to allow for more creativity around genres.

For example, if Thema tells us it is a picture book, do we make a chapter book a type of book, a genre, or an age range? Or all 3? This stuff is why librarians go insane (and you would be wise to fear their power 🤪).

Shepherd traffic updates

For September, we had 180,000+ unique visitors and 224,000+ pageviews. That is 21% higher than August and a new all-time traffic record. That is up 822% over the previous year.

Traffic from Google was up 30% month over month, which is fantastic! That will accelerate as we get more pages and features shipped. It usually takes ~3 years to rank for competitive Google searches.

My goal for 2023 is to reach 20,000 visitors and $10,000 in book sales daily.

What else is going on?

I am going on vacation next week! 😀

I am doing a big 1,000km bike ride through Italy. Wish me luck :)

Since we are a small team, I can’t stop working, but I will do the bare minimum while on break. Luckily I have Cathy, Serita, Joy, and Bella, who will keep the publishing process running while I am gone. This is a significant improvement over last year when I had to pause it while on vacation.

What am I reading?

The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. Fantastic book and I can’t wait for the sequels. The main character is hilarious, and I love them.

Bane of Gods by Alaric Longward. This is book 5 in a Roman Historical Fiction series I’ve been reading. I love the main character (flaws and all). I hope he can get out of the current situation without killing more of his friends through stupid decisions.

- Ben Fox

P.S. My son cracks me up; he put on all my coats and fell asleep on my floor.