- Shepherd For Authors
- Posts
- Shepherd - How can Shepherd help you as an author?
Shepherd - How can Shepherd help you as an author?
Ben Fox
March 01, 2024
What's new for March?
Quick 7-minute survey: How can Shepherd help you more as an author?
What have we started building for 2024 for authors?
Book & author series pages (highly requested by readers)
Interesting facts & stories pages (to help authors pull readers)
Design and engagement improvements for the book recommendation lists and bookshelves (plus testing improved book formats).
February traffic, clicks, and sales.
Ben's updates and reading list...
Funsize:
Kathleen Schmidt has a great post on book marketing in 2024, which I recommend you read. She talks about how the world has shifted and authors'/publishers' new reality.
Kate McKean wrote a great post about "What makes a market tough?" and why authors, editors, and agents are all complaining about why the book market feels so impossible. It isn't just you :).
I did a short, fun YouTube interview with WolfeSound. I talk about what I am trying to achieve for authors and why we are so careful about what we build.
I ask some big questions about what can help you most as an author.
I ask some specific questions about features I am considering building and which excites you the most as an author.
I ask some general questions about your goals as an author.
This survey does require a Google account, as I use Google Forms.
Why is this important?
The results will help me decide what we can use our limited resources to build in 2024 and 2025. I will share the results of the survey with you next month.
What is Shepherd working on for 2024 for authors?
This will add pages to show books in a series and book series by an author. I want to add this to the website as it is something I would like (and I get a lot of author and reader requests for this feature).
Status: The designer and I are finishing the last 30% of the design work. Then, I will review what we have in the backend and what we need to add and improve there.
I want to use facts and stories to engage readers’ curiosity and pull them toward books to satisfy that curiosity further. Plus, with our fantastic author community, we can provide verified facts by experts (breakdown of how these help authors sell books).
Status: The designer and I are working on the designs and playing with some different formats. Here is a very early mockup of one of the designs we are playing with.
Design improvements
The designer and I are playing with several improvements to our existing features. These are all designed to improve the reader experience.
Book Recommendation List: Improved Design
The designer and I are playing with an improved opening header for the book recommendation lists. This would show off the five books picked at the top of the list. The goal is to run a split test and see if this improves reader engagement over the current design (i.e., how many readers click to visit a bookstore, scroll down the page, and other key metrics).
Status: We are playing with design ideas and working to finalize those. I’ll share more as we get closer to testing this.
Big Bookshelf Expansion
Our current bookshelf feature has a problem. The readers who land on it from search engines are looking for the “best books of all time,” while we are providing a page designed for serendipity with filters to help them hone in on a book they want. This is an intent mismatch, and it is hurting our engagement with these readers (and thus our search rankings).
I plan to expand the bookshelf with a tab design to help readers find what they want while gently nudging them toward serendipity and books they don’t know yet. My mission with Shepherd is to help more authors meet readers and help authors who have a book with a magic spark to get more and more exposure. I believe this will help us accomplish both of those things.
We are still playing with a lot of ideas, but I plan to expand bookshelves into something more robust. Whatever we end up with here is designed to help all types of readers.
Status: We are playing with design ideas and testing these ideas with readers.
Testing some alternative book card designs
Currently, we are using this format on our Bookshelf and Books Like pages:
I want to test some different formats to see if they improve reader engagement:
A 2-column design allows readers to see more books visually and expand to learn more.
A 1-column design, but instead of an author’s recommendation, we feature their book recommendation list and see if that drives more interest in the book and the recommender’s list.
Status: We are playing with design ideas and testing these ideas with readers.
Wanted: Courageous and scrappy authors who want to build an indie book website that helps your fellow authors sell books. Join Shepherd's membership program on this hazardous and long journey, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success.
Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales
For February 2024:
We had 385,000+ visitors.
We had ~25,000 clicks to bookstore partners this month 🥳.
For a big-picture perspective:
In 2023, we had 5 million visitors! Woohoo!
In 2022, we had 1.8 million visitors.
In 2021, we had 266,000 thousand visitors (launched in April).
Detailed stats on our traffic, clicks, and sales stats page.
What else is going on?
This week, I had an author call me a racist, so that was fun. Because we are unable to support non-English books yet, that makes me a racist.
I explained time and time again this was a technical limitation, and I would love to one day add support for other languages (very expensive). But they felt that was more an indication of my inclusion in the KKK. They live in Israel, so I will assume they are very stressed and not themselves.
Last month, I got called anti-trans because I told an author I couldn't support a non-standard naming format that would break several of our internal variables. I didn't even know they were trans (nor do I care, as everyone should be whoever they want to be). I tried to accommodate them but couldn't do it because I realized it would break too much with our system.
What is my point? These types of interactions ruin my day/week; please be kind to your fellow humans :). I am not perfect... I get stressed, and I can lose my cool... but hopefully, I can also apologize. Thank you to everyone within this group for your support, as your kind words help me balance out these types of shittastic interactions.
What am I reading?
M: Son of the Century - About Mussolini and the rise of fascism. I am ~50% done and loving it. The format is unique, and the pace is almost like a drum beat that increases faster and faster as you see the end coming. Italy is just an utter mystery to me the more I learn.
Old City Hall by Robert Rotenberg - This is a fantastic thriller, and I am just getting into the meat of it. I'll share more next update as I hit 50%.
Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World - I just started this one, and it's super interesting so far. I am a bit of a nomad, and my mom bought this for my Birthday last year.
Thanks, Ben
P.S. My son has started reading chapter books!!!! Seeing him reading a book on the couch in quiet is amazing (it also freaks me out from a few rooms away as I come running worrying because it has been quiet for too long).
Do you have any tips on early reader chapter books?
He is intimidated by the huge blocks of words, so we are trying to find books like Dory Fantasmagory (his fav), Bad Guys, etc, with some illustrations to ease him into this new world. I just bought Mega Bat, as I found it on Shepherd, but we seem to be lacking in this area of children's books (I am working on that).
Do you like what we are doing?
I need your help. Can you join our Founding Member program for $50 a year to help me create a better book website for readers and authors?
In the last 12 months, Shepherd has helped 5 million visitors find new books and connect with authors like you.
We have a two-pronged strategy to help authors in the coming years.
Shepherd will create features to help authors get their books in front of the most likely readers for their book (and do so in a way that delights readers).
Shepherd will create a platform for authors and book lovers to build a fan base around book recommendations. Not only is that great for readers, but it will create thousands of book recommendation channels for authors to reach different slices of readers.
Here are my longer thoughts on how I plan to do this.
And why I am using a big chunk of my savings to get this started.
And a timeline showing our history toward this goal!
What are some of the perks of joining?
Founding Members get to use our new book launch program to help you meet readers! And once our new front page launches in January they will be featured there as well.
And I am aiming to launch two new formats in 2024.
Meet readers by...
You can sign up here to take part.