Today’s edition covers:

• Merry Christmas, and thank you! 🎅

• Our plans with Reddit book communities, book influencers, fan groups, and more as part of our “favorite reads of 2024” program.

• We just launched the new & improved Book Boost program for Founding Authors (as part of our membership).

• December roadmap & traffic updates

• Ben's updates and reading list

Fun Size! 🦥

• We are up to 1,600+ submissions for the Readers’ Favorite Reads of 2024! Please share your favorites and join the club.

Merry Christmas! I’ll talk to you in 2025!

I hope you have a fantastic holiday, and I really appreciate your support. I am very excited about 2025! Now that we have user accounts in place we can start shipping more and more features for readers.

In January, I’ll send a big update on what we are building in 2025 (and I will do a live Zoom event soon). Over the Winter, I am devoting a lot of thought to what features will best move readers from passively reading Shepherd to actively engaging at Shepherd (I wrote a short blog post with some of my thoughts here).

Our plans with Reddit book communities, book influencers, authors, book clubs, newsletters, and more are part of our “Favorite Reads of 2024” program.

I love NPR’s Books We Love, and we built a feature that allows us to create that setup for any type of community.

Why?

This allows book influencers, Reddit groups, companies, book clubs, or authors with large fan bases to create their own end-of-year “Readers’ Favorite Reads” page for their community.

It is a terrific way to see what your community loved to read this last year and celebrate those authors and books. And we promote the community’s book/newsletter/project under each person they refer (a great way to bump into their friends).

I didn’t get much time to pitch everyone this year since we only finished it a few weeks ago. But I’ve already had some groups interested, and I am excited to see how this first year goes. I will keep improving it for 2025.

Who are we trying it with this year?

We’ve got about 20 book communities, influencers, and authors onboard for this first year. Here are two early examples (you can see them listed under Fan Groups on the left side of Shepherd.com):

• Reddit book communities such as the Reddit LitRPG community, you can see their favorite reads so far: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/reddit-litrpg

• Author Michael J. Sullivan is trying it with his fans: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/michael-j-sullivan

This will really get going in January, as I am finding that most readers want to wait until the end of the year to share. I have more plans to help promote these groups on all of Shepherd as tastemakers. Strategically, this is part of our goal of helping more book communities flourish and get more eyes on a wider array of great books.

(I emailed Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson but haven’t heard back from them yet. Hopefully, in 2025 😄! )

What do you think?

If you are interested or know anyone interested, let me know ([email protected]).

The setup process is manual, so I must set it up for each group. The best time to launch this is in early January.

We just launched the new & improved Book Boost program for Founding Authors! 🎁

Our Founding Authors are getting a special holiday gift! 🎁

For the rest of December, January, and through mid-February, we replaced all the ads on the website with ads for their books as a big thank-you for their support in building this platform for readers and authors.

Then, in mid-February, we will switch to showing their Book Boost Ads to 100 of the most likely readers for their book every month as long as they are readers.

You can see some examples of the ads here:

• Book page: https://shepherd.com/book/dune

• Book recommendation page: https://shepherd.com/best-books/speculative-fiction-by-people-who-know-their-histo

• Books like page: https://shepherd.com/books-like/dune

We are trying some new ad designs, and we started pretty basic. As we get numbers back, we will rotate through the other versions to see what performs best.

How did we improve the targeting of Book Boost ads to readers?

First, we attempt to match the member’s books based on the similar authors they gave us during setup.

So, if three authors picked Frank Herbert (the author of Dune) as a similar author to their book, we would show their Book Boost ads on any page specific to Dune.

We only show ads for that pool of three authors, which is a significant change. It makes giving us a long list of similar authors very important (and we’ve increased that to 50 and will make that easier to use in the new dashboard).

If there is no match based on a similar author, we go to genres.

We match genres based on the number of shared genres. This fixes one of the problems of the first version of this system.

In the first version, if a book had the genres WW2, Adventure, and Historical Fiction, it could be matched with books that had just “Adventure” on them. Now, we limit the pool to the highest number of matches. So, a book has to match 2 of the tags (or more if there are more). This is a massive improvement in matching accuracy.

We will continue to collect data and tweak this through the end of February (the existing age group matching was working great and is still here).

What comes next for the Founding Authors?

1. We will build a basic dashboard for members to manage their Book Boost ads, view stats, and access other perks.

2. We will further improve ad designs as we get more data.

3. We will further tweak targeting as we get data.

If you haven’t joined the Founding Author membership, it is a great time to do so! 100% of your membership goes toward building and improving new features. I work for free and have been doing so since 2020!

My December Roadmap Update (For Authors)

What are we building now?

• Adding book series pages to Shepherd. (60% done)

• Upgrading the Book Boost Ad system for Founding Members. This will make the ads persistent, improve targeting, roll out new designs, and more! (90% done)

• Improving our default book cover if we can’t find a book’s cover. (0% done)

• Upgrade to our bookstore buttons to improve the UX. (0% done)

What are we building after that?

• Upgrading our bookshelves! I am so excited about this update, as it is what I always wanted as a reader 😀.

• Launching an author dashboard for Founding Members where they can manage their membership perks and Book Boost ad(s).

And then?

• 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. 

• I’ll share more as we get further along…

Traffic, bookstore clicks, and sales

For last month:

• We had 188,000+ visitors.

• We had 14,800+ clicks to bookstore partners this month. 

• Of those, 2,500+ were clicks to an author’s promoted book.

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, sales, and demographics.

What else is going on?

Christmas!!!! I’ll be MIA for the next week and spending time with my family. I am in dire need of Lego time with my son, and I plan to re-read Harry Potter this Winter.

My son finished Harry Potter 4 and started 5, I’m a bit worried it is too old for him but he is pretty good about telling us if so.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is an incredible book about addiction, causes, empathy, treatment, and society. I wish this were taught in high school as a half-year unit (in conjunction with other books). I had a great discussion about it in my book club.

I am reading...

• I am reading book 6 of the Space Wolves Warhammer 40k series by William King and Lee Lightner. This series is fun, and I am slowly getting into Warhammer 40k a bit more. As you can probably tell, I am a bit of a barbarian regarding books 🧐.

• Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter - I’ve heard great things about this book and read it with my Brother/Dad book club. It is about the attack on the Iranian nuclear facility and the advent of this new type of warfare.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. What are you listening to this last year? Anything I should check out?

Here are my top artists of 2024!