Why am I building Shepherd? (i.e., what is wrong with Ben 🤣)

I get this question a lot...

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

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 748 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 part-time designer so we can keep building great new features for our community. 

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Mood check for Friday, August 16th 🤪

Moving, unpacking, and settling into our new home has made for a very intense summer. In August, we flew to the USA to clear out an old storage unit from our time in Colorado and visit family and friends. We have ten more days before we head back home. I look forward to returning to our new home (and unpacking fully).

Why am I building Shepherd?

I get this question a lot, and it seemed like a good time to explain why I am putting so much time and money into building this.

I struggle to find books that I love.

It is easy to find books; you load up Amazon.com and start browsing through millions of titles. However, it is much harder to find a book that you will love.

I am tired of buying 4-star-rated books that lack characters with depth and arc. Characters are everything to me, and I am hungry for books that make me feel sad when I have to say goodbye to them. I want to find books where I delay reading the ending because I can’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to the characters.

I want to build a place to connect with readers who share this love of characters and find books through them. I don’t need a 100% success ratio; I just need to bump into a steady stream of books that other people love for the depth of the characters.

For other readers, this might be the uniqueness of the book, the world the author created, the writing style, the feelings the book evokes, or what they learned through the book. Whatever it is, I want to help readers find books they love (not just like).

I want to addict the world to reading because Shepherd helps them find books that match what they love to read (not just like), so they always have a book in their back pocket (better yet, a book in each pocket).

I struggle to find books that are served to me with a side of passion, personality, or expertise.

I love getting book recommendations from friends, but it is rare. So, I want to find more “book friends” who share my interests and tell me what books they love 🧐.

I love feeling someone’s passion for a book and being inspired to read it (like this list).

I love asking people what books changed their lives or comforted them when life slapped them hard (and I am excited to bring these formats to Shepherd soon).

Passion, personality, and expertise are much better than a star rating.

I despise star ratings for books.

Rating a book 1 to 5 stars is a travesty for humankind 🤣.

I understand the need to summarize data to assess whether a book is a match… but a book is so personal, and 1 to 5 stars is so impersonal.

I want to improve this and will launch a Book DNA review format soon.

With this format, we go further and try to define why people love that book so we can better match readers with books. I am desperate for this feature as I want to find books through these attributes (sneak peek here).

I’ve run out of authors and need more.

I’ve run out of authors within many subgenres and I need to grow more.

The internet (and capitalism) tends to create a winner-takes-all market, and we need to fight this to get a new and bigger generation of authors. I don’t want to help grow the next Michael Connelly; I want to help grow the next 100 Michael Connelly’s in every subgenre.

How can I help new authors sell enough books to stay motivated and write more?

How can I help authors who are getting good reviews get more and more publicity without having to spend 20 hours a week spewing out nonsense on social media?

How can I spot trending books and push them to readers who will love that book (not just like), thus helping word-of-mouth spread?

What can I do to help authors work full-time on their writing? How do you do that in this modern age when a monopoly controls the industry and publishing is struggling so badly?

Books are the best part of humanity, and selling them like toothpaste is a war crime 🫢.

When I look for a new book online, it feels soulless. Online bookstores sell books like toothpaste or powdered gravy mix, and something about that is profoundly wrong. 

Books are magic.

Books are imagination fuel. 

Books change how we see the world.

Books change the direction of our lives.

Books transport us across time and space. 

Books let us see the world through another person's eyes and emotions. 

I believe they are one of the biggest net positives in the world. 

Carl Sagan said it best in Cosmos:

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

How can I help readers find books at the exact time they need them most in their lives?

How can I build an experience that sells books in a way that reflects how magical they are?

How can you build the magic of discovery and exploration into a screen?

Books build better people and increase our appreciation of complexity 😵‍💫.

Show me someone who loves to read, and I’ll show you someone who is likely only an asshole 5% of the time (an acceptable level IMO).

Sure, your boss might be a neo-nazi who loves reading about the newest conspiracy theory, but statistically, people who read “have higher empathy, better social ability, have better perspective, and a clearer understanding of human nature” (study 1, study 2, study summary 3, and more).

The more people read the better results for all of us.

What is going on outside of Shepherd?

Family visits and chaos.

Somehow, though, I managed to finish the spec for the upcoming book series page this week.

What am I reading?

I just finished...

• A fantastic historical fiction about the Baltic Crusades. It is book 2 in the series and has not yet been published, but I will share it when it is!

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. This book is back in France, but I look forward to finishing it once I get home.

• A Pilgrimage to Eternity - I love books about pilgrimage routes, and this one has been lovely so far. I did part of this route on my bike a few years ago.

• Blitzed - A book about all the drugs the German soldiers and Nazi party were doing in WW2 (and Hitler). The story gets more and more insane as I wrap it up. It seems like the last two centuries might need to be renamed “white people discover mind-altering substances and lose their damn minds.”

• Daughter’s War is book two of the Blacktongue Thief fantasy series. Book One was one of my favorite fantasy books of the last few years. This one is slower so far, as nothing happens in the first 60% of the book. It is a beautiful world, though, and fantastic writing. I am still chugging through this one.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. My son and I contemplated the nature of beauty in Colorado.