Shepherd Timeline
“Shepherd Born
After receiving a fantastic response to the concept, Ben started working on the project full time.
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“Beta Launch!
Shepherd goes live on April 19th. We launch with 400 authors and 2,000 recommended books.
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“Related Book Lists!
Related book lists are added so that readers can keep following their curiosity. This is a very simple version while we work to build a more accurate recommendation engine.
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“1,000 Authors
1,000 authors have joined Shepherd and submitted a book recommendation list, woohoo!
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“25,000+ Monthly Visitors
We receive 28,000 visitors for the month. The first time we’ve received more than 25,000 monthly visitors.
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“2,000 Authors
2,000 authors have joined Shepherd and submitted a book recommendation list, woohoo!
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“50,000+ Monthly Visitors
We receive 65,000 visitors for the month. The first time we’ve received more than 50,000 monthly visitors.
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“Bookshelves!
Bookshelves are based around topics and help readers explore books in fun ways. We use machine learning and NLP to do this at scale. We launched with 1,000+ bookshelves on everything from World War 2 to dinosaurs.
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“Search!
Readers can explore books based on Wikipedia topic, favorite author, and favorite book.
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“New Frontpage!
We launch a massive update for the frontpage that integrates search, book lists, and bookshelves.
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“4,000 Authors
4,000 authors have joined Shepherd and submitted a book recommendation list, woohoo!
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“1st Anniversary 🥳
For our first year in operation, we received over 500,000 visits! And we finished our first year with 25,000 recommended books, 5,000 published book lists, and 1,800 bookshelves. Thank you to the authors and fantastic team that makes it all possible.
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“100,000+ Visitors
We receive 100,000 monthly visitors for the first time! ”
“New Recommendation System!
We launched our new recommendation system at the bottom of each book list. This allows readers to keep following their curiosity through the website. Try it at the bottom of Steven Pinker’s list on rationality.
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“New Bookshelf Design!
We launched an improved design for the bookshelf pages (after a lot of user testing). This switches the format to one column instead of two, and it shows more about the person making the recommendation (including being able to meet them and their book). Try our bookshelf on dystopias.
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“200,000+ Visitors
We receive 200,000 monthly visitors for the first time! ”
“Book Pages!
We added individual book pages so you can explore each book and why you should read it (try Kitchen Confidential or Dune). We also added a page so you can easily see the lists that book appears on.
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“Books Like Pages!
Want to find new books via books you already know and love? Now you can through our “books like” pages (try this page with books like Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain). All powered by human recommendations.
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“Explore Points!
We added book explore points across Shepherd so that you can easily dive into that book! Just click “Explore this book” for a book description and links to why that book is recommended, similar books, lists with that book, related topics, and soon genres (try it here).
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“8,000 Authors
8,000 authors have joined Shepherd and submitted a book recommendation list, woohoo!
We are working on additional formats for 2023 to help authors meet readers through their 3 favorite reads of the year, interesting facts and stories, and their characters.
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“400,000+ Visitors
We receive 400,000 monthly visitors for the first time! ”
“Genres & Age Data!
We added genre and age bookshelves and filters to help you discover the type of book you want. Try our bookshelf on science fiction and use the filters to zoom in on books about robots, A.I., and more! Or try our bookshelf on middle school books and zoom in on genres and topics your kid will enjoy!
Adding genres and ages was a HUGE project. and I am so excited to see this in the wild. Next. we are working on adding genre and age data to search, the front page, and the rest of the website.
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“2nd Anniversary 🥳
Over the last 12 months, we have helped over 3.2 million visitors discover new books! We are just getting started and have so many cool features planned for year three. Thank you to the authors and our amazing team that keeps us humming along.
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“3 Favorite Reads Of The Year!
We launched a new format around author’s 3 favorite reads of the year. Here is an example of author Ingrid Ricks’ favorite 3 reads of 2023. Our goal is to help authors share their favorite reads of the year while promoting one of their books. And this format feeds into our Best Books Of The Year (see below).
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“Best Books Of The Year!
This uses the 3 favorite reads of the year data to show the most-favorited books of 2023 by 1500+ authors. Our goal here it to delight readers with great books and it is part of our long term goals to help give authors more publicity who have a book with that “magic spark.”
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“Member Perk: Book Launch Ads!
We launched a big perk for our Founding Members who make this website possible. Every year Founding Members get a book ad for 60 days on the website to get exposure from the most-likely readers for it (you can read details for how it works here).
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“500,000+ Visitors
We receive 500,000 monthly visitors for the first time! Thanks to a lot of publicity around our new best books of the year feature.”
“5 Million Visitors in 2023
We had over 5 million visitors in 2023! We have a lot further to go but we made a good start of it :).
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“Huge improvements to search!
We made some massive improvements to improve our search feature. We now return search result pages to help readers find where they want to start browsing for books.
Try our page on Stephen King, the book Tom Swan and the Head of St. George (one of my favorites), a topic like pandemics, a genre like fantasy, or an age like young adult (we also have specific ages and grades).
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“New & Improved Frontpage!
We upgraded our new frontpage to make it easier to navigate and pretty :). It focuses on showing off our Best Books Of 2023, our author’s latest book recommendation lists, and lists by our Founding Members.
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“3rd Anniversary 🥳
I am so excited about our upcoming features for readers! What are my 3 big goals for readers?
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Help readers find books they will LOVE! How? By building a Book DNA profile of them using the books they love and why they love them (and books they don’t like). Then, we will use similar Book DNA profiles to feed them books they will love.
Create fun and unique ways to explore and discover books (aka delight readers).
Create a strong reader community around sharing what you LOVE to read.
“100% Personalized Book DNA Email
Pick 3 of your favorite authors/books and 3 of your favorite genres/topics. Then, we show you book recommendations from passionate authors, readers, and experts. And you can sign up for a weekly email that will surprise and delight you.
My goal is to delight and surprise readers with 100% personalized book recommendations from passionate authors, experts, and readers like you. In a world of AI, readers crave authenticity, and we are going to be there to feed them 😂.
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What’s Next?
Here is our roadmap for what we are building now!
Want to support our work?
Please join as a Founding Member and help create a better book site for authors and readers. Every dollar you give goes directly to developing new features (and nowhere else).
My goal is to hire a full-time developer (everything you see was built with a fantastic part-time developer). A full-time developer would allow us to ship new features faster for authors and readers. Check out the special perks for authors who join (including our new book launch ad program).