We are collecting your 3 favorite reads of the year! Woohoo!
Wish us luck as this is a huge amount of work :)
Every two weeks, I share my notes on building Shepherd.com.
Shepherd is like wandering around your favorite bookstore. We make exploring and discovering your next book magical (while helping authors get their books in front of the most likely readers).
Please join our Founding Member program and build a better book website for readers and authors.
September 25th to October 6th
I emailed authors the 3 favorite books of the year template on October 1st! 🥳
If you didn’t get it, please reply, and I’ll get you that.
Why is this an adventure?
This is a considerable workload compared to a normal month, but at the end of the month, we get to share the most-read books of the year!
Usually, we publish 200 to 300 book lists each month.
So far, we’ve had 593 three-favorite-reads submissions! And we still have 160+ tickets/emails we haven’t processed yet.
In one week, we’ve had 2x our normal monthly workload come in.
And I expect to get another 1,000+ submissions in the coming weeks. We need to put each submission in our platform, create books and profiles, edit everything, review it with the author, and then schedule publishing. As you can imagine, we are shifting workloads and how we are working to try to handle this big increase.
What am I working on?
It has been a crazy week!
My big priority is working on emails/tickets to help Cathy get everything into the proper queues so Joy can add it to Shepherd Admin. Next week, I will likely be focused on assisting Serita with editing, although I am waiting to see how everything looks. The team is putting in extra hours to make this happen.
What else?
I’ve been doing user tests to improve our search feature. This is what we are working on this winter, along with the new front page. The tests are going well, and here is a quick snapshot of what I am testing (a search results page).
I am finishing the design & spec for the new book launch program. We will build this in October/November (after that, we will ship an updated front page and search function).
We are still playing with the colors, but feel good about the format. If you click “Who is Ben” it shares more about the author as well.
What is going on outside of Shepherd?
We had a great visit with an old college friend of mine yesterday. She and her mom were passing through Porto, and we had a long lunch, an afternoon on a sunny beach, and a second ice cream to cap it off.
What am I reading?
I am reading book 2 of the Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The scope and world he has created is fantastic.
Thanks, Ben
P.S. From a fantastic lunch post bike-ride this summer.
