Today’s edition covers:

• What book marketing questions do you have?

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

• March roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

Fun Size! 🦥

• I did an interview with Rob Jolles on his podcast about Shepherd (you can listen to it here).

• We are up to 2,050+ 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 😀.

• Just in case you missed it, I have a YouTube here with an overview of our 2025 roadmap that I did on a live Zoom last week.

What book marketing questions do you have?

Please ask your book marketing questions here.

Keep in mind that this is anonymous, so I can’t answer you directly, but I will answer your overall question in the future. You can also email me at ben@shepherd.com if you want to ask me something 😀.

Why am I asking for these?

1. I am creating a presentation on book marketing, and I’d like to know what is missing from it so that I can make sure I cover it.

2. In the coming months, I will answer these questions as best I can (with the help of authors and experts).

🔔 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 do 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).

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 any questions you have.

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, what is the rough rule of thumb on 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. What can you do?

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

My March Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What are we building now?

• Adding book series pages to Shepherd. (99% done)

  • This is shipping soon, and then we need to build all the data. I’ll share examples next month as we launch this 😀!

• Upgrading our personalized book recommendation email for readers. This work should take 2 to 3 weeks, allowing people to pick the frequency as we keep evolving this beta feature. (50% done)

• A massive upgrade to our bookshelves, which group books around genres, topics, and age groups. (5% 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!

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

• We had 212,000+ visitors.

• We had 14,000+ clicks to bookstore partners this month. 

• Of those, 1,700+ 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 on a weekend bike adventure in Basque, Spain; we biked, ate some steak, and enjoyed the sunshine. He got a new bike with gears, so now he can do more hilly routes I pick out 😄.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• All 3 of David McCloskey’s spy thrillers: Damascus Station, Moscow X, and The Seventh Floor. They were fantastic and some of the best thrillers I’ve read in the last 10 years. The ending of Seventh Floor was brutal.

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 doing some research on curiosity as it is one of the big foundations of Shepherd in the coming years.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. Biking with my son in Northern Spain…