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Shepherd's February and why does Brandon Sanderson think it is hard to launch a new book?

A slower update this month as I have been so busy on Shepherd.

Author

Ben Fox
February 27, 2025

Today’s edition covers:

  • Brandon Sanderson, Daniel Greene, and Devon Eriksen share some great points on launching a new book (and book marketing in general).

  • Ben is moving from Amazon to Kobo…

  • February roadmap & traffic updates

  • Ben's updates and reading list

Three hurrahs for our 869 Founding Authors! 🥳 Your support keeps Shepherd independent and togther we will build the book platform authors deserve.

What do Founding Authors receive?

- 📚 Book Boost Perk: We introduce you to 100 to 200 of the most likely readers for your book every month as a thank you for your support!

- 💪 You are directly funding a team that whose mission is to figure out how to make it easier for authors to sell their books in ways that delight readers.

In 2025, my goal is to reach 1,200 Founding Members and cover 70% of our current costs. We are slowly closing in on 100% as we grow!

Thanks, Ben Fox and the small but mighty Shepherd Team.

Fun Size! 🦥

Brandon Sanderson talks about the growing difficulty of launching as a new voice.

The below will jump you to minute 27 in the video, where Brandon Sanderson and Daniel Greene make some great posts on how hard it is to launch as a new author. The below link will take you to this (and the entire video is great). And they then go into how unsustainable marketing has become. It is spot on!

This is what inspires me, and we need to figure this out!

  1. How do we launch a new book in this modern era? How can Shepherd help authors do that more and more as we grow?

  2. How do we help authors build their fan base to make it easier and easier?

  3. How can we identify books that are clicking and get them in front of more and more readers?

This is what I think about as we build everything at Shepherd…

Authors need to understand what business we are in.

We are not in the book-selling business. We are in the brand-building business.

The basic unit of an author's financial survival isn't the book sale. It's the fan.

A fan isn't just someone who read your book. It's someone who loved it. That person will give you money, not because they can't get your stuff without it, but because they want to support you.

The moment my first novel became even the tiniest bit popular, it was up on the pirate sites so fast it would make your head spin. There's nothing I can do about that. If I could fry each server with a giant orbital laser cannon, they would still pop faster than I could do so.

But that doesn't matter. Because most humans are prosocial. They will indeed pay for something they could get for free, because they want to thank you for making it.

My readers, my fans, are NOT my customers. They are my patrons.

Authors are being robbed, all right, but not by some guy reading library books.

We are being robbed by Kindle Unlimited, by Audible, by Amazon and Tor and Del Ray and Baen. We are being robbed by the people who insert themselves between our fans, our patrons, who WANT to pay us, and ourselves, the people who they actually want to pay.

Yelling at fans is the sign of an entitled twit of an author who doesn't get it. We make our money off the goodwill of our audience, and it was always been so since the invention of the photocopy machine.

Wanna be a rich author?

1. Generate a lot of reader goodwill.

2. Eliminate the middlemen who steal from you and your readers.

Yelling at some library enthusiast on social media accomplishes neither #1 nor #2.

Sci-fi author Devon Eriksen

Ben is moving from Amazon to Kobo…

You probably heard the news that Amazon has removed the download and transfer option from their Kindle setup as of February 26th.

That was the last straw for me. 

For a company I once adored, it was just one more bad step in a long series of bad steps. This is especially frustrating as I know the great people at Amazon love books and are trying to do good, but they are hamstrung by lousy leadership and decisions (same for Goodreads).

I downloaded all of my 2,700+ Kindle books and am moving to Kobo. My new Kobo Libra Colour is coming next week, and I look forward to playing with it. For authors who are only on Kindle, I’ll hold onto my old Kindle for now…

I also canceled my Audible and KU subscriptions.

I should have canceled Audible long ago, given the low payouts for authors, but when I switched to Libro.FM, it was an even worse experience (they weirdly blocked Shepherd from linking to them because there was too much traffic from readers; can you believe that? It was the weirdest email exchange I’ve had in some time).

Have you thought about moving from Amazon?

I would love to hear your thoughts as a reader and author. Authors always face the question of going Amazon exclusive or wide, and I’d love to hear if that has shifted at any point.

I am doing a call with Andy, the CEO of Bookshop.org, next week.

My February Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What are we building now?

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

    • We hit a minor roadblock with our API provider. We are working on this, but I hope to finish it soon and launch it!

  • 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. (10% done)

  • A massive upgrade to our bookshelves, which group books around genres, topics, and age groups. (1% done)

    • This update will do the following:

      • Add a “best of all time” page to see the top recommended books within that grouping. You can narrow it down to see the best books published in a year or decade, fiction/nonfiction (depending on the grouping), age group, and more. So you can do things like “show me the top science fiction books published in the 1960s.”

      • Add a page showing the books that are trending within that grouping. So you can do things like “show me all science books that are trending in January.”

      • Add a page to highlight new books (books published in the last 3 years).

      • Add a page to browse the book recommendation lists for that bookshelf. These are lists made by passionate experts on the subjects.

      • Facts and stories will also be coming later this year.

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!

  • Launch our interesting facts and stories feature.

  • Launching our to-be-read tool for readers!

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

  • We had 172,000+ visitors.

  • We had 13,000+ clicks to bookstore partners this month. 

  • Of those, 2,200+ were clicks to an author’s promoted book.

For a big-picture perspective:

  • In 2024, we had 3.2 million visitors!

  • 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). 

What else is going on?

Beyond a cold from hell, I’ve been reading a lot 😀.

My wife and I just finished the Chernobyl TV miniseries. The weight of the situation was chilling at times, but it was an incredible story (thanks to my brother for recommending it to me).

For my son’s Winter break, we drove to Spain, and I am enjoying the sunshine and biking.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

  • A Soldier's Life by AlwaysRollsaOne—I love fiction about Ancient Rome, and this book moves Ancient Rome into a fantasy world (along with some LitRPG elements). I am enjoying it and am about to finish book #3. I can’t quite tell why I am enjoying it so much, as the characters are not crazy deep, but the world has ensnared me.

  • Not Till We Are Lost (Bobiverse #5) - I love this series and Dennis Taylor didn’t disappoint with book #5. I can’t wait to see where it goes.

  • A Tide of Black Steel by Anthony Ryan - This is a fantastic fantasy book from an author I enjoy. The first 150 pages were a bit slow, but once I got the characters and world, I was hooked. He has created an amazing world, and I am looking forward to the sequel this summer.

  • The Russia House by John le Carre—My brother picked this as his choice for our family book club. It is my first John le Carre book, and I thought it was okay. However, my brother said this book wasn’t as good as his others. I am going to try The Little Drummer Girl next.

I am reading...

  • Damascus Station (by David McCloskey) - I found this book through Shepherd and picked it for our family book club.

  • 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.

  • The Pillars of the Earth (by Ken Follett) - My best friend recommended this to me back in 2008, and I finally dived in. It is incredibly good, although hard to read at times, as the margin for failure is so small in a world where the powerful rule with absolute authority.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. Biking around one of my favorite places in Spain!