Today’s edition covers:

• The big 2024 Shepherd wrap-up!

• Where are we headed in 2025?

• January roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

Fun Size! 🦥

• We are up to 1,850+ submissions for the Readers’ Favorite Reads of 2024! Please share your favorites and join the club.

• Kathleen had a fantastic interview with author Alex Segura, which digs deep into marketing, publicity, and many other good topics.

The big 2024 Shepherd wrap-up!

Over 3.2 million readers visited in 2024!

Woohoo 🥳!

I love knowing that readers are coming to Shephed to meet books and authors they have yet to discover. And that is a big number. I want to grow it to be a LOT bigger.

What else?

We had over 237,000+ clicks from readers on the website to bookstores.

Of those clicks, over 41,000 were to an author’s promoted book. I am especially proud of this number, as it means we helped many authors meet new readers who have yet to know them.

(We also have many users who copy the book title and author to paste into their favorite bookstore and library since we currently only support Amazon and Bookshop.org. So our actual impact is higher.)

What were the most popular book lists on Shepherd?

1. The most popular list of 2024 was Brian Guthrie’s list of the best science fiction books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read. His list went viral, and over 30,000 people visited within a few days.

2. Scott Galloway’s list of the best books to help you be your best self was the second most popular. I am a big fan of Scott’s, and he has a big fan base.

3. E.Y. Kellye’s list of the best books in the spicy fantasy genre.

4. Caroline Abbott’s list of the best books to read if you think you are being emotionally abused.

5. Stu Jones’ list of the best cyberpunk books that revolutionized the genre.

Fun note: quite a few lists with only 1/10th of the traffic as our most popular list converted as many readers to bookstore clicks. Why? Because those lists are getting traffic from readers looking for a new book and, they convert at 8% to 20%. A lot of traffic sounds great, but if it is viral it doesn’t mean they are in a buying mood.

My goal with this book recommendation format is to help as many authors as possible reach the most likely readers for their books. But it isn’t Oprah-level traffic; it is small but constant publicity to your strongest fan bases (when done correctly). As we grow, we will roll out more and more ways for authors to connect with readers and help books with that magic spark get more publicity.

Why was 2024 so tough on me?

In 2023, we had over 5 million visitors, and this year, we had 3.2 million. That was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing at times.

What happened?

Google is self-destructing and taking large parts of the indie web with them. I have a longer post here if you want the nitty gritty, but here is a quick summary.

Google is killing the open web.

Nobody knows what is happening, but their search engine started breaking down in Summer 2023. Some people believe they have lost control of their AI ranking systems, while others believe that the McKinsey alumni who run Google Search are purposefully doing this to increase ad earnings (DOJ leaks from the ongoing trials hint at this).

We’ve seen our traffic from Google drop by 70% this year. Shepherd is luckier than most, as our traffic from every other search engine and traffic source is up. And we didn’t lose all our traffic from Google.

Are they trying to fix it? Nobody knows…

To their credit, Google has acknowledged the problem and invited some creators to a summit to listen to them. However, it is not clear if Google will fix the problem or if they can fix it, and nothing has been fixed so far. My longer post here includes breakdowns from many other websites.

Many of my friends and acquaintances have had to shut down their websites and businesses because of this. Vast swaths of the independent web are gone and not coming back.

It is sad to see, as Google doesn’t seem to care (many people within Google care immensely, but don’t seem to have any control of it). Their search results are moving toward 80% ads and 20% organic results. And they continue to recommend publishers like Forbes who use AI to write articles and don’t test any products they recommend. It is a new world as AI is radically changing the written web.

What does this mean for Shepherd?

It doesn’t change much. Why?

Shepherd has always been working to become an app that readers use to discover new books, and this doesn’t change our work toward that goal. Over 2025 and 2026, we will be shipping many features for readers as we work toward that goal (more info on that below).

The biggest frustration is that we were very close to breaking even on costs, and we’ve had our legs swept out from under us. We met about 50% of our costs in 2024, and that sucks as we were getting really close to 100% before this. If you want to help, please join us as a Founding Author, as that is what keeps us alive and building the best book platform for readers and authors.

Where are we headed in 2025?

I am incredibly excited about 2025!

We have a lot planned for readers as we build out tools and personalization for them. The more readers using Shepherd, the more we can help authors.

How will Shepherd help readers?

My goal with Shepherd is to help readers find books they will love, not just like. We will bring their TBR pile to life, making it as magical as the books it holds. We will use their Book DNA to explore what they want to read next. Or they can lose themselves in a maze of books loved by other readers. We are built by readers, for readers, to celebrate the magic of books and the artists who write them.

Does that resonate with you as a reader?

Please hit reply and let me know.

What are the big things we will be working on in 2025?

Improve our topic and genre system + add themes, tropes, moods, and more as discovery points for readers.

We need to improve the accuracy of our topic and genre systems. This is the beating heart of the platform and powers everything we do. Not only does it power our discovery process, but it helps us assess what books are within your Book DNA (in conjunction with data from other readers).

We pull genres from publishers. The quality is pretty good, but we still see many inaccuracies. Plus, the industry's BISAC classification system is missing genres that readers use. I am testing some approaches with AI to improve how this works.

Our topic system uses an excellent free ML/NLP system called Wikifier. It parses the text and identifies Wikipedia topics within it. However, newer AI systems are much more accurate, and we will be switching this system to one of those. In the long term, I still hope to connect concepts to Wikipedia as I have some unique ideas there (I do not have enough money to build them yet).

At the same time, we will also try to pull themes, moods, and tropes to build a better profile of each book’s Book DNA. I’ll share more as I get further into testing.

We need to build a database of all books.

We need to implement this so you can leave recommendations for any book, select any book, and much more (especially as we build out proper author profile pages that include all an author’s books).

I put this off in our early days due to the cost. Licensing the entire database of all books and building all the infrastructure and code to manage it is expensive. But it is time, and we need it for all the upcoming features for readers.

We will look at free sources of this data, and I hope those are good enough for how we plan to use them. Few people know this, but Goodreads is built by thousands of Goodreads librarians who work for free to fix all the problems in these book databases. It is one thing I wish they would share access to (but they don’t).

Launch a beta of our TBR Pile Product.

Shepherd will be the place readers use to manage and explore their TBR pile (TBR stands for to-be-read, in case you haven’t heard that acronym 😆).

I know that not all readers will use this, but it will be the heart of our platform.

Why?

Helping readers figure out what they want to read next is where we can do our best work as a book discovery platform. And what we learn here will power the features more casual readers use.

As a reader, I want to visualize my TBR pile and do things like…

• Show me all the books in my TBR pile with a specific genre, topic, mood, trope, or theme (or mix and match).

• Show me all the books that other readers have rated as having amazing characters, worlds, emotion-evoking, taught them something, changed their lives, etc. Or mix and match this with other filters so that I can see all the science fiction books that readers who shared my Book DNA rated the characters highly.

• Show me all the books in my TBR pile similar to another book I love.

• Show me all the books in my TBR pile with authors I’ve rated highly.

• Show me the books in my TBR pile that are a high match for my Book DNA and why.

• And more….

I feel confident we can do something amazing here that they will love. And it puts us in a great position to help readers looking for their next read find something new from an author they don’t know yet.

My January Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What are we building now?

• Adding book series pages to Shepherd. (80% done)

• Part 2 of the Book Boost Ad system for Founding Members. This will make the ads persistent, improve targeting, roll out new designs, and more! (10% done)

What are we building after that?

• A massive upgrade to our bookshelves, which group books around genres, topics, and age groups. 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.

  • We won’t be able to add the facts and stories bit yet, but I hope that will come later this year.

• This is a giant update for our genre and topic system. It needs a significant revamp to improve genre/topic accuracy. And we are working to add themes, tropes, moods, and more! This is a monster project for Winter. 

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

• We had 186,000+ visitors.

• We had 15,900+ clicks to bookstore partners this month. 

• Of those, 2,500+ 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). 

Detailed stats on our traffic, clicks, sales, and demographics.

What else is going on?

I’ve been enjoying cozy Winter nights with my family as a cold front hit us in France. In the evenings, we’ve been playing many new board games.

My son just turned 8 years old, and we started watching the original Star Wars movies. We have Return of the Jedi queued up for next weekend! I haven’t watched them in 25 years, and they hold up well. It has been fun to share those with him.

I’ve been listening to Will Clarke’s Midnight Mass, which I highly recommend (my favorite song is Weekend Love).

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman: I am not a big LitRPG reader, so even though people kept recommending it, I didn’t buy it. What a mistake!!! This book is one of the best books I’ve read in the last two years. It is hilarious, and the humor is similar to the TV show Always Sunny in Phildillpha (which I love). It is science fiction and subverts the LitRPG genre to be a lot more approachable. And what a writer, he nails it on every single page. I read all 7 books in a few weeks and can’t wait for book #8.

I am reading...

• Natural Born Heroes (Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance) by Christopher McDougall - I bought this many years ago and am finally digging in. It is from the author of Born to Run, which I enjoyed.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. I am looking forward to doing some bike trips with my son once it warms up a bit…