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Shepherd - Who had the most popular book lists for 2023?

Shepherd - Who had the most popular book lists for 2023?

Ben Fox
January 14, 2024

What's new for January?

State of Shepherd: 2023 Edition 🥳
What were the 20 most popular book lists of 2023?
What were the 20 most popular bookshelves of 2023?
We had great press for our "Best Books of 2023" feature!
December traffic, clicks, and sales.
Ben's updates and reading list...

Funsize:

I did a fun interview with Angie & Mike about Shepherd and other topics. I discussed where we are going and what we have learned thus far.

2023: State of Shepherd

How many readers visited Shepherd in 2023?

We had over 5 million visitors in 2023! 🥳

That is up from 1.8 million visitors in 2022.

Our biggest month was December 2023, with 543,000+ visitors. We got some good press for our new best books of the year program.

The only bummer was traffic growth from Google in 2023. Traffic from Google has been entirely flat over 2023. We started the year getting around 10,000 visitors a day from Google, and that is how we ended the year. Google has become very chaotic, and they are struggling to determine what they should be ranking. Right now, they are ranking big publishers with pages that are not very helpful. I hope they improve in 2024.

How were the financials for 2023?

Shepherd increased its income by 2.5x this year. That is great! Our Founding Member program was a big help, and I aim to reach 1,000 members in 2024.

This year, we covered ~40% of our costs (with me covering the rest). For 2024, I’ve reduced our costs as much as possible, and we will focus on creating only 1 or 2 new features this year to keep dev costs lower. My goal for 2024 is for our income to cover 80% of our costs and then break even in 2025. All our revenue from the Founding Member program goes directly into new features (I work for free).

How did revenue break down?

45% from affiliate sales at our bookstore partners
33% from our Founding Member program & donations
22% from display ads

How did costs break down?

53% for development and design work
29% for our awesome team that keeps us running smoothly :)
18% for server and software costs

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions. If you are friends with Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, let me know if they are interested in matching our funding and helping us build faster 🤪.

What were the 20 most popular book lists in 2023?

I thought it might be fun for you to see these 🥳.

How many readers visit the top book lists?

The #1 book list on a topic/theme/mood received anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 readers each month. The top 20 book lists range from 400 to 2,000 readers each month.

The books in the top 20 vary a lot every month. There is a lot of seasonality and random spikes. For example, the lists on JFK and Teddy spike every year around key historical dates in their lives.

I'll share a big breakdown of how traffic is distributed over all the lists in February. Sorry, I've been so busy catching up I haven't had time to crunch this yet.

Why these book lists?

Most of these lists got lucky and rank on Google for high-volume searches. They are also lucky that their topic/niche has a lot of searches.
Some got lucky with geopolitical events, big movie releases (Napoleon and Oppenheimer), or other big news events.

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.

What were the 20 most popular bookshelves in 2023?

Bookshelves are big pages around topics, genres, and ages where readers can filter to find books (and book lists) based on various factors. We have around 3,500 bookshelves currently. I am working to expand bookshelves in 2024 to add a lot more.

CIA
UFO
Occult
Geopolitics
JFK Assassination
Conspiracy theories
London Blitz
Arranged marriage
Apartheid in South Africa
Rape
All Books (our wizard a lot of people start with)
Marie Antoinette
Nonfiction
Regency books
World War 2
The Book of Revelation
The Chinese Cultural Revolution
Auschwitz Concentration Camp
The East India Company
Fiction

Why these bookshelves?

Most of our top-ranked lists are nonfiction because we've had topic bookshelves since January 2022. It takes a long time to rank in Google for competitive phrases. Even though these pages have been around for 2 years, it can take many more years before Google starts ranking them.
We launched genre bookshelves in May 2023, and the story is the same. It will take a lot of time to rank those.

I think that our bookshelves are not quite meeting reader expectations. I know they have some issues with topics, genres, and search intent. I need to improve the data quality and UX further. I am going to work on that in 2024.

We had great press for our “Best Books of 2023” feature!

We got featured on Hacker News and two large email newsletters. That resulted in big traffic spikes to our Best Books Of 2023 page. Because of those spikes, we saw days with a spike of 30,000 visitors, 60,000 visitors, and 35,000 visitors (we usually have 10,000 to 14,000 visitors each day).

We've had 163,000+ readers visit the Best Books of the Year feature so far.

I still need to do more press; I didn't have as much time as I would like to do that this year and will be working on that further in January.

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For December:

We had 5438,000+ visitors.
We had ~40,000 clicks to bookstore partners this month.
We are on track to sell $800,000 to $1,200,000 worth of book sales this year. That is likely quite a bit higher, but we don't get credit for many of those sales (which is okay -> details on why here).

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?

My son and I got hit hard by the flu. We are doing better now, and our energy levels are back to normal (apart from 48 hours of food poisoning for me). It's a rough start to the year, but hopefully smoother after this 😀.

I am finally caught up on all emails. And our team is caught up on all favorite-3-reads submissions. Yay!

What am I reading?

I just finished The Last Devil To Die (book 4 of the Thursday Murder Club series). It was fantastic; it made me laugh and cry. I found it through the best books of the year.
I just started Wounded Tigris: A River Journey Through the Cradle of Civilization.
I am still working on... M: Son of the Century (the story of Mussolini).

Thanks, Ben

P.S. Happy New Year! Picture of the beach outside of Porto, Portugal.

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?

How do we help authors like you?

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 launching two new formats in 2024.

Meet readers by...

You can sign up here to take part.