Shepherd's 2024 plans are emerging...

Synergy. Synergy. Synergy.

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 to expose their stories, personalities, and books.

Three hurrahs for our 615 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 February 29th 🤪

I am so done with February. I can’t wait to start seeing the sun and get out of this long period of rain and gray.

What is the plan for 2024 so far?

What are we working on now?

Adding book & author series pages

This will add pages to show books in a series as well as book series by an author. I want to add this to the website as it is something I would like (and I get a lot of author and reader requests for this feature).

Status: The designer and I are finishing the last 30% of the design work. Then, I will review what we have in the backend and what we need to add and improve there.

Adding interesting facts & stories

I want to use facts and stories to engage readers’ curiosity and pull them toward books to satisfy that curiosity further. Plus, with our fantastic author community, we can provide verified facts by experts.

Status: The designer and I are working on the designs and playing with some different formats. Here is a very early mockup of one of the designs we are playing with.

Design improvements

The designer and I are playing with several improvements to our existing features. These are all designed to improve the reader experience.

Book Recommendation List: Improved Design

The designer and I are playing with an improved opening header for the book recommendation lists. This would show off the five books picked at the top of the list. The goal is to run a split test and see if this improves reader engagement over the current design (i.e., how many readers click to visit a bookstore, scroll down the page, and other key metrics).

Status: We are playing with design ideas and working to finalize those. I’ll share more as we get closer to testing this.

Big Bookshelf Expansion

Our current bookshelf feature has a problem. The readers who land on it from search engines are looking for the “best books of all time,” while we are providing a page designed for serendipity with filters to help them hone in on a book they want. This is an intent mismatch, and it is hurting our engagement with these readers (and thus our search rankings).

I plan to expand the bookshelf with a tab design to help readers find what they want while gently nudging them toward serendipity and books they don’t know yet. My mission with Shepherd is to help more authors meet readers and help authors who have a book with a magic spark to get more and more exposure. I believe this will help us accomplish both of those things.

We are still playing with a lot of ideas, but I plan to expand bookshelves into something more robust. Whatever we end up with here is designed to help all types of readers.

Status: We are playing with design ideas and testing these ideas with readers.

Testing some alternative book card designs

Currently, we are using this format on our Bookshelf and Books Like pages:

I want to test some different formats to see if they improve reader engagement:

• A 2-column design allows readers to see more books visually and expand to learn more.

• A 1-column design, but instead of an author’s recommendation, we feature their book recommendation list and see if that drives more interest in the book and the recommender’s list.

Status: We are playing with design ideas and testing these ideas with readers.

What else am I researching for 2024?

I am still testing and researching a lot of ideas to see what we have the financial capacity to build in 2024. My tactical goal with whatever we build is to reach $20k a month in income to afford one full-time developer. That is key so that we can keep innovating for readers and authors.

What else am I working on?

• I am 30% done with launching a store with some fun surprises for readers.

• I rolled out a big test around author profile pages. I’ll share the results after I have 30 to 60 days’ worth of data.

• I am crunching data on the book launch ad for Founding Members, and I’ll share the results in March.

• I put together a short spec to improve how we link to audiobooks. We will see if we can afford to make the links smarter so that the “preview audio” only shows up if there is an audiobook for that book. This is hard, but I should know more in 4 weeks.

• Revamping and optimizing all our internal tools over the next 3 months. The editors and I just finished revamping our style and editorial guidelines.

What is going on outside of Shepherd?

My son has started reading chapter books! Seeing him reading a book on the couch quietly is so cool.

What am I reading?

• M: Son of the Century - About Mussolini. I am ~50% done, I am digging it, but it is slow going.

• Old City Hall by Robert Rotenberg - This is a fantastic thriller, and I am just getting into the meat of it.

• Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World - I just started this one, and it's super interesting so far. I am a bit of a nomad, and my mom bought this for me for my Birthday last year :).

Thanks, Ben

P.S. My son reading a book from the Dory series.