Building Shepherd - Launch News, Related Book Lists, and Timeline.
Building Shepherd - Launch News, Related Book Lists, and Timeline.
312 authors have now committed to writing a book list for Shepherd’s launch (or already turned one in). The response has been fantastic 😃.
Feb 22nd - Mar 5th.
Upcoming Launch News
We are on schedule for the April launch of our public beta! The front page of the site and the book list page are 95% done. We are now working on the few remaining bugs and some of the underlying features the frontend needs to work correctly.
I want to give a big thank you to all my friends and family who have given me feedback so far! Thank you to my amazing wife Lindsey, Nick, Arun, Justin, Tom, Claire, Paul, Lucas, Michael, and many more. It is very appreciated 😃.
What's next? Relating book lists to each other.
Below you can see how we are going to connect readers from the book list they are viewing to related book lists. This design element will go on the bottom of every book list page.
For authors, this will help their book list get more exposure and traffic. That will result in more interest in them and the book they feature alongside their list 😃. A win-win!
What else? Timeline for upcoming features!
We will launch into public beta in early April. The first version of the website will be pretty basic. It will have book lists and a homepage that features the latest book lists, a list of topics, and a list of authors.
This first version of the website won't have a great way to find topics and we will be working to add three critical features to make this easier.
What are those features?
Related Book Lists - As you can see in the screenshot above, this feature will help readers follow their curiosity and increase exposure for authors. We are aiming to unveil this in early May.
Shelves - A Shelf is a collection of topics. So there would be a shelf for World War 2, History, Buddhism, Grief, Philosophy, and so on. These topics help readers find book lists and books that interest them. And, each Shelf helps us give authors more exposure to interested readers. This is a very complex feature and we are aiming to unveil it in late July.
Search - Once we add Shelves we will add search to the header menu. This will allow readers to find Book Lists and Shelves easily based on topic and keywords. We are aiming to unveil this in late August.
I hope you have a great weekend, feel free to hit me up with any questions or ideas if anything pops up.
Thanks, Ben