Shepherd Roadmap
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Here is a complete timeline of the big public features and events since our launch.
What are we building in 2025?
Here is a presentation I gave to authors to explain what we are working on in 2025 😀. Please forgive my scratchy voice; I was just getting over a nasty cold. The first 20 minutes share what we are working on now, what is next, and where we are going over the rest of 2025.
Meet the team creating Shepherd.
We are bootstrapped, and everything you see is being built by two part-time developers working ~30 hours a week. If you want to support what we are building, please join us as a Founding Author or Founding Reader to support us!
My goal is to hire a full-time developer as we grow and add more and more perks for our members.
What are we working on right now?
Adding Book Series pages to the website (and as a concept on the backend). This is 99% done, but we hit a snag with the way we build the book series data. We are working to fix that and should have an update soon…
A short batch of work to improve our personalized book recommendation email (adding the ability to choose frequency). We are still testing this with early users and should reach 1,000 subscribers shortly. Once we feel this is in a solid place, we will roll it out on all of Shepherd.com.
We are going to do a massive upgrade to our bookshelves! I am super excited as this is what I want when I browse for new science fiction or history books. I can’t wait to unveil it to you!
What’s next?
We will do a small upgrade to improve our Book Boost perk for our Founding Author Members. This is a thank-you perk for our Founding Members that gets them extra promotion in front of the most likely readers for their book(s). And, for authors who want book ads, we will launch the beta of that platform at the same time. I am teamed up with ~5 authors to test that system (we removed the ugly display ads on the website as I would much rather advertise books!).
We are upgrading our genre and topic systems to improve their accuracy and add tropes, themes, and moods. This is a big project that powers a huge swath of Shepherd.
Launch our TBR pile tool for readers! We will bring your TBR pile to life, making it as magical as the books it holds. You will be able to use your Book DNA to explore what you want to read next…
The next 12 months?
The above is not an exhaustive list, but a good sketch of what we are actively working on after the above-mentioned items.
What did we add so far this year and in past years?
2025
January - Big improvement to our recommendation system on search pages. The lists we recommend are now much better matched to the genre and topic. Try this one for Space Opera under “book lists connected to space opera.”
2024
January - Search Revamp - We made a massive improvement to how search works. Now, when you search for something, you click and get a search result page which will help you find the right place to start browsing. You can search for a genre, topic, author, book, age, grade, or age group. Examples: Science Fiction (genre), WW2 (topic), How Democracies Die (book), Barbara Kingsolver (author), 1st graders (grade)
January - New & Improved Frontpage - Try our new frontpage. We changed the focus to search to help readers find a place to start wandering our aisles. We made special spots for our best books of the year (as picked by 1,500+ authors), the latest book recommendation lists, and book recommendation lists by our Founding Members (who make everything you see possible).
May - Improved the accuracy of our search index and some backend improvements to the systems that run Shepherd.
June - Launched the beta of our personalized book recommendation email system. This allows readers to pick their favorite books/authors/genres and get a weekly email with unique ideas based on that. This is our first step toward building a stronger connection with readers. The accuracy of the system is something we are working on, and we have some big improvements coming toward the end of 2024.
July/August/September/November - Built out and refined our user system. And integrated it so that users can now submit their 3 favorite reads of the year online (first user feature). Plus a TON of improvements for our end of year best books program.
December - Launched a referral tool to help reward authors and readers who referred friends to us.
December - Launched a beta program to team up with book influencers, authors, and websites to help them run their own “best books of the year” programs. For example, here is one we did with the Reddit TrueLit community. I learned a lot and this is something I hope to improve further in 2025 and 2026.
2023
January - We automated 90% of the book creation process. Previous to this, we did it all manually. Now we only need to find an ISBN/ASIN, check for errors, and find a high-definition book cover image.
February - We added genre and age data to the backend and many tools to manage those. We also totally revamped the backend for bookshelf pages so that we can bring in genre, age, and other data. As well as child pages and some other cool tricks.
March - We added the concept of a book series to the backend systems.
April - We updated the Bookshelf pages with a new meet the experts section and improved card format to show readers what book list the book recommendation came from (plus some other randm improvements).
May - We shipped the age and genre bookshelves and new filter setup to help readers hone in on the type of book they are looking for. Try it on the science fiction bookshelf or our kids bookshelf.
August, September, and October - We shipped the backend and frontend features we needed for the upcoming “best books of the year” feature.
November - Launching our new book launch program!
December - Starting work on the updated front page plus a massive improvement to our search feature.
2022
January - Added search.
January - Bookshelves went live on January 11th (try our bookshelves on WW2, grief, or dragons). We use machine learning and NLP.
February - The new front page went live on February 1st. Woohoo!
April - We improved the speed of the website and backend systems.
April - We vetted book metadata providers and signed a contract with one. We built a system that pulls the book metadata into our backend. Now that we have this data we can start the work to add genre pages, children’s sections, and a lot more (prior to this we didn’t even know if a book was fiction or nonfiction).
May - We added tools to our backend systems that we needed. And, we shipped some small UX/UI improvements.
June - We shipped a huge update to the topic engine to improve accuracy. Our topic engine is what analyzes each book in our system to determine what it is about. This system powers all the bookshelves, search, and upcoming recommendation engine. We revamped the logic and brought in LOC data.
July - We added the concept of book editions to our system. This improved the quality of the book data we have.
August - The new recommendation system for book lists went live in mid August. This adds a new section on the bottom of each book list that recommends related book lists, bookshelves, and books.
August - The new bookshelf UX went live in mid August. We moved to a 1 column format after testing with readers and improved how we show the author making the recommendation (try it here).
November - Individual book pages went live on November 15th! You can explore each book and why you should read it (try Kitchen Confidential).
November - “Books Like” pages went live on November 15th. These allow readers to find new books via books they already knokw and love (try books like Kitchen Confidential).
November - We launched simple pages that show what book lists a book appears on Nov 15th (try here for lists with Kitchen Confidential).
November - We launched book explore points site wide. These help readers see the book’s description and links to why that book is recommended, similar books, lists with that book, related topics, and soon genres.
2021
We launched in April 2021, and I didn’t record this back then, but a lot was built :).
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Every dollar you give goes directly to developing new features (and nowhere else). My goal is to hire a full-time developer if we can raise enough money. A full-time developer would allow us to ship new features faster for authors and readers.