Building Shepherd - Launch Preview & Pitch Me A Book Feature
478 authors have now committed to writing a book list for Shepherd (or already turned one in). The response is fantastic 😃.
Mar 22nd - Apr 2nd.
April 15th Launch
The last two weeks have been busy 😃. I finally caught up on loading all the book data in our backend system. There are now 1,858 books, 2,013 authors, and 328 book lists in our system. I have another 28 book lists to process and more coming in every day. I am glad that I froze new author outreach for the last four weeks as it has given me some time to finish all the data entry.
What's next? Reviewing pages with authors.
For the next two weeks, I will be emailing every author a link to their book recommendation page to ensure everything looks perfect. Plus, further testing and finishing all the remaining items on the frontend.
If you want to check out an early version of the site, here is the fantastic Margalit Fox's book recommendation page on "The Best True Stories That Read Like Police Procedurals".
What else? Pitch me a book feature.
One of the features we will be shipping later this year will pitch books to readers one book at a time. Think dating app but for books 😃. So a reader would come to the site, pick a topic they are interested in, and be pitched books one at a time. And, since the person pitching the book is an author it gives us a chance to introduce that author, their book, and their book recommendation list (all with our goal of getting authors more exposure).
I've got a very early mockup of that feature below. This is literally the first mockup and it will be getting a LOT of revisions as we test and play with the concept.
I hope you have a great weekend, as always feel free to hit me up with feedback or questions,
Thanks, Ben
