🥳 The best books of 2023 is launched!
It's alive!!! It's alive!!!
Every two weeks, I share my notes on building Shepherd.com.
A huge thank you to the Shepherd team for doing an amazing job in October! That was a massive increase in workload, and everyone pulled together to get things done.
Launched → The best books of 2023
You can browse the most-read books here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023
Plus, we broke down the results by things like…
By fiction, nonfiction, audiobooks, and book club books.
Genres like mystery, thriller, fantasy, sci-fi, romance, historical fiction, history, business, true crime, horror, and more!
Ages like baby, children, middle grade, teen, young adult, and adult.
How many favorite-3-reads submissions did we publish for launch?
884 published! And ~500 more coming soon…
So far, we have received 1,372 submissions (more coming every day).
184 are in some state of author reviewing (or waiting for me to make changes for them). And, around 300 are pending our editing and setup process.
We will accept submissions through December 31st, so as those are published, everything will update with more fantastic book recommendations.
Woohoo! What’s next?
We have ~500 more fav-3-reads submissions we are working to publish. I brought in two temporary editors who are helping us to catch up.
Once we get caught up, I plan to sit down and reflect on what I learned and how I can improve this next year. Some of those thoughts are:
Doing a better job with children’s authors, I didn’t expect adults to recommend kids’ books, and I need to look at how these book picks can be from a “branded” perspective. Similarly, if someone is an absolute nut for military sci-fi, how can I give them a place to recommend their favorite 3 books inside that genre that they read 60 books within? I want to help authors and book people connect with readers over these book recommendations, and I need to take a more extensive look at how to do that with these approaches I was not expecting.
How to automate more of what we do to reduce bottlenecks. Especially what that means around editing and how we can improve that.
Looking at inviting readers to participate next year, but with a much different format. I will run some smaller tests around that in November/December.
Look at the stats to see how well this is converting for authors and interest in their featured book. I’ll share that on the author newsletter here → https://forauthors.shepherd.com/for-authors-newsletter
What else?
I need some rest. I am exhausted as I have been working many nights and weekends. I will be flying for the next 24 hours to visit family (the timing didn’t work well with the launch, but oh well).
I’ll share some longer notes with the authors in the newsletter soon.
Thanks, Ben