Personalized book recommendations in every email box.

Plus, improvements for the 2024 Best Books of The Year Program

Every 3 weeks, I share my notes on building Shepherd.com.

I believe that books build better people. I am on a mission to help readers explore & discover books in new and unique ways. I want to create the magical feeling you get wandering around your favorite bookstore but for the online world. And I want to do this while helping authors reach readers in fun and authentic ways.

Three hurrahs for our 717 Founding Members who keep us independent and fund new features. My 2024 goal is to reach 1,000 members to fully fund our part-time developer and designer so we can keep building great new features for our community. 

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Mood check for Friday, June 14th 🤪

I am home after a 3-week 1,000km gravel bike ride across Spain to France and feeling very refreshed. My family is moving to France in June/July, so there will be a fair bit of chaos. However, I am looking forward to getting settled in our new home 😀.

What are we working on?

Adding User Accounts & Personalized Book Recommendation Emails

I should have something to share in 1 to 2 weeks so you can try this feature out. We are investigating a few bugs and working to implement the email part of this feature.

This is our first step in bringing the magic of your book recommendation lists into readers' email boxes. This is a big focus for the coming years, as we will use our email list to help launch more reader features.

What are we building next?

Improving the Best Books Of The Year for 2024!

• Opening it up to readers!

• Making it the first feature to use our Book DNA review format.

• Improving the system to help authors get extra publicity.

Now that we have a user system, we will use it to collect authors’ and readers’ favorite 3 reads of 2024 (examples from 2023).

We are also going to switch the format to our Book DNA review format. This format is designed to help readers connect with books they love by building a profile of why they loved each book. I’ve been working on it for quite a while.

Here is a very early mockup as we start getting this ready…

Roadmap Review

What are we actively building?

• Adding user accounts for Shepherd.com.

• Adding a personalized book recommendation email system.

• Improving our audiobook preview links.

What is next?

• Revamping the 2024 Best Books Of The Year program to use our new user system, the new Book DNA review format, and open it up to readers.

• Switching the Book Boost program for Founding Members to provide persistent exposure for their books as a perk to thank them for their continued support.

What is ready for the dev but I am not sure on ETA yet?

• Launching pages around book series and getting that in place.

• Improving the design for our book recommendation lists.

What are the designer and I working on?

• All the design work for revamping the 2024 Best Books Of The Year program.

• All the design work needed to expand the bookshelves and improve them as a discovery point for readers.

• Improving the usability of the book and books-like sections.

What am I working on?

• I am testing how to improve topic and genre accuracy, as I am not happy with the publisher system (it is abused and doesn’t reflect what readers want).

• Creating a spec for the upcoming interesting facts & stories system.

What is going on outside of Shepherd?

I am getting ready to move from Portugal to France, and June and July are going to be very busy months. I am looking forward to unpacking all the boxes in our new house.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• Rereading the entire Wheel of Time Series. This is one of my all-time favorite book series, and this is my 4th re-read since my 20s. 

• M: Son of the Century - Great book about Mussolini, and next, I hope to read about the rise of Franco in Spain. This is a very slow-paced book, but I enjoyed the format. They do an almost week-by-week account of the rise of fascism with what seem to be only first-person sources and writings. Mussolini and his party came across as real buffoons, and it seems like they got incredibly lucky that it somehow led them into power. 

• As part of my book club with my brother and dad, I read The Man Who Loved China. This was a fascinating book about Joseph Needham - "the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country".

I am reading...

• Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World is a fascinating account of a group that is part of our DNA. Yet we know little about them because they left little physical evidence. 

Thanks, Ben

P.S. Some pictures from my bike ride in Spain and France.