Goodbye ugly display ads and my plan to replace them with book ads.
Goodbye ugly display ads and my plan to replace them with book ads.
A scary change, but one that I am excited to roll out.
Every 3 weeks, I share my notes on building Shepherd.com.
Join the rebellion and help me create the indie book platform readers and authors deserve! Three hurrahs for our 823 Founding Members who keep us independent and fund new features. Readers and authors can become Founding Members (both get special perks, and more perks are coming).
I am very excited about what we are building 🤗
Some fun features are coming…
It is amazing to see what Shepherd has become since I started working on it in December 2020. I am incredibly excited about the upcoming bookshelf upgrade, as this is exactly the type of page I want when exploring science fiction or fantasy books.
Best Books of 2024 Update
The Best Books of 2024 program is running smoothly, and we’ve almost hit 1,000 submissions. We need one more week to finish some tweaks. Then, we will work on a referral program. Now, the hard part starts… marketing and publicity to spread the word 🧐.
Big Traffic Burst
We had a book recommendation list on “the best science fiction books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read” go viral on HN (which is always fun to see). It has had 27,000+ visitors in the last 10 days (and more are still coming in).
I removed all of the ugly display ads.
On November 2nd, I removed all the ugly display ads from Shepherd.com.
This is a slightly scary move, as they pay for a good chunk of our server and software costs (see our business model). But I feel confident we can replace them with book ads and provide a better experience for readers and authors in one go.
Over the last six months, I’ve interviewed hundreds of authors and small publishers and learned what they want from ads, what is working, and what isn’t working.
Their feedback was immensely helpful, and I am working to build this feature based on their input and what I have learned from our Book Boost Perk for Founding Members.
The ultimate goal is to give authors a “one-click” way to get their book in front of the most likely readers based on similar authors, similar books, similar genres, and other factors. And to do that in an authentic way that drives interest in the author and their book(s).
First: How will you improve the Book Boost Perk for Founding Members?
I am giving a special holiday thank you to our Founding Members.
As a huge thank you to all our Founding Members, we are going to switch all the ad spots on the website to them for November, December, and January. We are working to make this change now, and I will officially announce it soon (once we are ready to turn it on).
I wanted to do something special for them, given their support. And encourage other authors to sign up as members and support what we are building.
We are moving from a 60-day burst of advertising for Founding Members to persistent exposure every month.
The current Book Boost perk comes with one 60-day burst every year. That was an excellent way to start, but I want to switch that to persistent exposure day after day and month after month.
I will switch the system to focus on getting their book (or books) in front of the 100 to 200 readers each month who are most likely to read it. We will be hyper-focused on narrow targeting based on similar books, authors, and genres. The ad messaging will be personalized to the reader (something we will further improve over time).
The most important thing is to make this easy for authors. Why?
The feedback I heard the most from Founding Authors is that they love that they give me their book, and we take care of everything else. We work to target their ad to the right readers, manage the entire ad design, and improve reader engagement using that data. And authors know we are working on marketing their book, and they don’t have to monitor or tweak the ad constantly.
We are improving ad-targeting
The original design of the Book Boost perk was too wide. Part of that is how we built version 1.0, and part of that is due to the limits of our current genre/topic systems.
How will we improve this?
We will shift targeting to focus more heavily on similar authors, books, and genres. Then, this winter, we will upgrade our genre and topic systems internally, which will drastically improve the quality of our matches.
We are rolling out new ad designs.
We’ve got new designs ready, and with this update, we will start testing them against the existing design. My goal is to increase reader engagement, so we plan to test a more standard pitch ad, quiz ads, and ads that feature recommendations by readers within our community.
How will you roll out the *big* book ads program?
(Founding Members get our Book Boost Perk as a thank-you for their support. That perk is limited in reach to the 100 to 200 most likely readers for their book(s) each month.)
Our big Book Ads program will work similarly to the Book Boost Perk but without the limit and with more ad spots around the website. My goal is the same (to help authors get in front of the most likely readers for their book based on similar authors, similar books, similar genres, and eventually other factors).
I am finishing the spec for it now, and we aim to roll out version 1.0 in January. I’ll share more details in the coming months, but here is what I am testing…
A dashboard to manage book ads.
We will roll out a simple dashboard for authors to manage which books are advertised, along with similar authors and similar books for their book (s). As well as see stats, manage membership, and a few other mundane things.
I am especially looking forward to automating more of the stats process. Right now, I manually do that every three weeks for Founding Members, which is difficult.
What else?
Giveaways—Authors and publishers like giveaways, and I am looking at what we can do here.
Price points and a starting cap on participating authors—I am trying to figure out how to price this and where to cap participation. That is a tricky one, and the developer and I are chatting about how to do that later today.
What is going on outside of Shepherd?
We spent an amazing week up in the mountains. I spent a lot of time hiking, reading in a hammock, and enjoying time with my family.
What am I reading?
I just finished...
All six books in the Sword of Jupiter series. Think of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, except in an alternative history of Ancient Rome. Fun reads!
I am reading...
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts—This is my brother’s pick for our dad/sons book club, and I look forward to it. It is about addiction and recovery (which is not something I’d typically read).
Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World is about the history of nomads and a group we know little about. I don’t often read paperback books, so this one has taken a while as I forget to pick it up.
Have a great week,
Ben
P.S. Picture from our week in the Pyrenees mountains.
