Today’s edition covers:

• Launched → Big upgrade to our personalized reader newsletter.

• Want to join the next basic book marketing presentation on Zoom?

• Book series update (we almost have everyone’s series pages ready)!

• May roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

Fun Size! 🦥

• We are up to 2,200+ 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 😀.

Launched → Big upgrade to our personalized reader newsletter.

Reminder: We have a personalized book newsletter where readers can input their favorite books, authors, genres, and topics. Then we email them book ideas based on their desired frequency. It is another way we help authors like you get in front of readers.

What did we upgrade? (Check your account here to see these settings):

1. Readers can change the frequency from weekly to every 2, 3, or 4 weeks.

2. Readers can change the variables that go into the selection (so you can update the books, genres, authors, etc., on which it is built).

Exiting beta and what’s next?

We now have 1,200+ subscribers who receive personalized book recommendations every week. We are seeing high engagement, and I am pleased with the progress.

• ~60% open rate (although probably higher as email providers mess with this stat).

• Around 15% to 20% of readers click on at least one book recommendation list.

• Our CTR rate to bookstores is around 5x our regular traffic.

The next step is to roll out integration throughout Shepherd (later this year). We are going to try an exit pop-up like this based on the type of books they are looking for:

And playing with a footer spot to see how well that works.

The most significant improvement we can still make is improving our genre and topic accuracy. Our roadmap has more information on how we plan to do that.

I’m not sure of the ETA for that piece, but as soon as we upgrade that system, it will instantly improve everything here.

Want to join the next basic book marketing presentation on Zoom?

Reminder: On May 10th, I did a new Zoom presentation on the basics of book marketing (and a big Q&A). This is a new presentation, and I did not record it. I will record the next one as I wanted to improve it a bit more.

When is the next Basic Book Marketing Presentation?

Thursday, June 5th

• 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 Thursday, June 5th). I look forward to chatting with you; I’ll bring my coffee!

Sign up to attend here (I will also record this one).

What will it cover?

• What is the bare minimum of book marketing? Why?

• A walkthrough of what makes the perfect Amazon book page.

• The 3 things you should always include in your book to create fans.

• Why is Shepherd not like Oprah?

• What free marketing options are out there for authors?

• When are paid marketing options worth it?

• Q&A with everyone.

Book series update!

Thank you to the hundreds of authors who submitted their book series to us!

I am sorry it has taken us a while to add them. We had to create the ability to pull book data from Amazon when the book is exclusively on Amazon. Usually, we can pull this data from our book metadata provider, Nielsen, but they do not have that data if a book is exclusive to Amazon. Plus, it took a fair bit of time to add everyone's series and check them with human eyes 😃. 

We’ve added over 1,000 book series, and on Monday, Cathy will start emailing everyone with their book series (it might take a week or two as we go through the huge list). I am also working to fix any of the remaining bugs we are hitting.

What if my books are missing their book description?

Unfortunately, Amazon does not provide the book's description via its API (which is very weird). I am working on fixing this, and we will add those as soon as we find a workaround.  

What if my "books like" page isn't working?

We will fix that soon if that page is blank for you. We've been creating the "books like" page using book recommendation lists connected to those books, so if your book series doesn't have any books connected to a list, it doesn't generate that. We will build a new feature to generate those via related genres if we don't have a connected list for now. 

My May Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What are we building now?

• Upgrading our personalized book recommendation emails (Launched!). This system is out of beta now, and we added the ability for readers to change the email frequency and variables that go into it.

• Adding some new features to improve the book series feature as mentioned above (75% done).

• A massive upgrade to our bookshelves, which group books around genres, topics, and age groups. (50% 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. This will also add a stats email for our Book Boost ad for all members.

• 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!

Browse our full roadmap here.

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

• We had 173,000+ visitors.

• We had 12,900+ clicks to bookstore partners this month. 

• Of those, 2,200+ 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 am home from my Ireland trip and feeling good, as France is sunny and warm. I’ve had some great bike rides, and I finally don’t need a jacket! Woohoo!

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• The Century Series by Ken Follett: I loved this series. It follows five families through WWI and over the next 100 years in Russia, the UK, and the USA. I love how the books weave significant historical events into their day-to-day lives. It was beautiful and an excellent overview of this incredible time. The rise of fascism was incredibly disturbing as we watch a lot of our modern safeguards crumble away.

• Book 4 of the A Soldier’s Life series is a LitRPG book (which I’ve been trying more of since I read DGC). It plops a character down in a world based on Ancient Rome but with magic, and I love it. It is like a combination of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with fantasy. I read book #4 in two days.

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.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. Picture of my son enjoying a quiet moment with history. No limbs were lost as a result of his actions.