Today’s edition covers:

• Goodreads but smarter: How can we help readers track book series?

• Need book marketing help? Let’s do a call.

• We made the book section easier to navigate.

• September roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

Fun Size! 🦥

• Jane Friedman has a fantastic summary of how publishing has changed since 2015. I highly recommend you read this!

• A nice write-up from an author about their first event at Barnes and Noble and how it went.

• There is an excellent thread here on Netgalley and some helpful comments by other authors.

• We now have 4,377 book series published on the website, and we are working to add thousands more. If you want us to add your book series, please email [email protected], and we will bump it to the top of the list.

Goodreads but smarter: How can we help readers track book series?

We are making good progress on the app! Later this week, Marcos (our part-time frontend developer) will start building the frontend elements for the MVP.

Here are the latest shots of the mockups:

Tracking your favorite book series

One of the big features that many readers (and I) want is a way to track which book series we are reading. Right now, I have random notes on my computer to help me track them, but it doesn’t work very well.

For example, I didn’t realize how many new books Old Man’s War by John Scalzi had come out, as I had only read the first two books in the series. I want to make it easy for readers to see which book series they are reading, so they can easily pick up new books when they're released.

Here is the UX we are playing with currently (early stage):

Need book marketing help? Let’s do a call.

This is normally only for members, but if you are thinking of joining, you can book a time using the link below.

I hope that after we chat, you will join as a member and help us build Shepherd 😀. Membership starts at $50 a year, and every dollar goes toward creating this platform.

Recently, I’ve talked with authors about the following…

• Reviewed their Amazon listing for what could be improved

• Reviewed their book cover and how that fits in with their genre

• Talked about possible outside-the-box book marketing they could be doing

• Reviewed book marketing options and what is/isn’t working

• Talk about pay-per-click ads on Amazon and Facebook, and what to try

• I walked them through the full-reader app we are building and how that will help authors in the long term.

• Explained how aspects of Shepherd work and answered questions they have about the different formats.

Click here to find and book a time in October and November!
*If there isn’t a good time for you, please email me and I’ll find a spot.

We made the book section easier to navigate.

We added better top-level navigation for the individual book pages.

Now readers can easily jump between our recommendations, books like that book, and book lists with that book. Before this, those sections were a bit harder to find.

This is 97% done as we are still fixing some bugs, but you can try it for yourself here.

My September Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What are we building now?

• We are adding email automation for our favorite three reads of the year event (75% done). This is needed so that I don’t have to do it manually and maintain a separate suite of expensive tools.

• We are moving off Algolia to Typesense. This will help us save money and scale better as we grow (75% done).

• We are improving our books-like engine (50% done). I’ll share more on this as we finish this up.

• We are upgrading our Book Boost perk for members and adding a paid marketing program for authors who want it. This will also add a stats email for our Book Boost ad for members. (10% done)

• We are improving the navigation within the book and book-like sections (99% done).

• Fixing a bug with our infinite scroll setup in a few spots (99% done).

• Our full reader app (like Goodreads but smarter and more personalized). This is a massive project, and we are working to launch the MVP. We are currently working on building a full book database and developing frontend elements. (2.5% done)

What are we building after that?

• We will add personalization to the favorite three reads of the year program. This will make it more interactive for readers and better surface readers who read like them.

• 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!

Browse our full roadmap here.

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

• We had 150,000+ visitors.

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

• Of those, 2,900+ 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 had a great solo biking adventure! I spent 3 weeks biking from Belgium down through Switzerland and eventually ended up in Nimes, France. I rode 1,269 km with ~16,000m of elevation gain. I’m a bit tired, but happy to be home 😃.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• I finished books four and five of the Kingsbridge series by Ken Follett. He is a fantastic writer, and I love how he throws you into a really distinct era with each book. The Armor of Light was wonderful as always. I wonder if he will do any more as we get closer to the modern era?

• Shockwave Rider by John Brunner - This is one of my dad’s favorite books, and we are reading it as part of our family book club. This book is 50 years old, and it is mind-blowing how he saw the internet and other technology emerging.

I am reading...

• The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi. This is book 7 in the series Old Man’s War. I reread the series on my bike ride so I could read this new entry (I think I had previously only read the first 2 in the series before I lost track of it). It's been excellent so far, and it's fantastic to be back in this universe. I like how he jumps around to different characters within it.

• They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933 - 1945, by Milton Mayer. I am almost done with this one. I had to leave it at home during my bike ride, so it has been paused…

Thanks, Ben

P.S. From my recent bike ride 😃