Today’s edition covers:

• The Best Books of 2024 is live! How is that going?

• How is the My Book DNA newsletter going?

• October roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

First, a quick poll to improve future emails…

The Best Books of 2024 is live!

We've had 300+ submissions in the first week! Woohoo! 🥳

3 quick reminders to help you take part:

• User accounts are new, so nobody has an account yet. Please sign up for a Shepherd account and then complete the form.

• If a book is missing, use the “Add Missing Book” button that appears when you start typing its name. Just add the book title and author and we will create everything after that.

• Please email [email protected] with any changes you want after submission. We have not built an editing system yet, but that is on our list. For now, Cathy and I can make the changes you want 😀 .

2 examples from authors!

How is the My Book DNA newsletter beta going?

Background: The My Book DNA newsletter is a 100% personalized book recommendation newsletter. Readers pick 3 books/authors and 3 genres/topics, and we send them a weekly email with recommendations for book lists they are interested in. Our goal is to delight readers with deeply personalized picks and lead them to book lists that authors and experts like yourself made. For Shepherd and our authors, this builds a large email channel to reach readers through. We rolled out the beta on July 5.

We are seeing very high engagement from readers!

The best sign is that we are seeing a 30%+ conversion rate to bookstore clicks, which is a good sign that this is working. And we are seeing a 10% conversion rate to the author’s promoted books on those lists.

The feedback has been positive. The biggest complaint is that genre/topic accuracy is not great, but that will improve once we revamp that system this Winter.

Next, we need to scale to 1,000 subscribers.

I need to reach 1,000 subscribers and ensure the engagement numbers match what we see with the smaller audience, especially as we add readers who don’t know our brand as well.

If those continue to look good, we will then improve the beta:

• Add the ability to choose the email frequency (i.e., every week, every 2 weeks, and every 3 weeks).

• Add the ability to edit the books, authors, genres, and topics that go into this email.

I expect we will reach 1,000 subscribers in November or December, and I will update you then. If this continues to look good, we will roll it out sitewide!

My October Roadmap Update

What are we building now?

• Fixing bugs and rolling out design improvements for the “Best Books of 2024” feature. (85% done)

• Add book series pages to Shepherd. (50% done)

What are we building after that?

• Upgrading the Book Boost program for Founding Members to provide persistent exposure for their books as a perk to thank them for their continued support. And some big improvements to placement, matching, and ad design.

• Upgrade our bookshelves to improve discoverability and how they work.

And then?

• A big update for our genre and topic system. It needs a big revamp to improve genre/topic accuracy and a lot more. This is a monster project for Winter. 

• I’ll share more as we get closer…

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

• We had 177,000+ visitors.

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

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?

I am enjoying Fall and trying to get outside before Winter fully arrives. I did a quick six-day 500km bike tour across France to bring my new gravel bike home. I would bike in the morning, eat an amazing long lunch, and work till late at night. It was a nice change of pace. 

After I got home, we had our first positive case of COVID-19. Luckily, my wife feels better; my son and I missed it. If you can, get a booster, as it is not something you want.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

I am reading...

• Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World is a fascinating account of a group that is part of our DNA. Yet we know little about them because they left little physical evidence. I am slowly catching up on my paper reading, as I tend to get stuck in my Kindle most weeks.

Thanks, Ben