My name is Ben Fox and I’m the founder of Shepherd.com. Shepherd is bringing the “fun” back to online book discovery.
Buying books online is boring! The big bookstores sell books the same way they sell toothpaste—without passion. They are constantly trying to shove us into book lists made by machine algorithms that have the same personality as my pet rock. This is deeply wrong and I am on a mission to fix this.
My inspiration started with my local bookstore. I love wandering around my local bookstore until a book catches my eye. Maybe the book has a cover of a decapitated unicorn, maybe a staff member marked it as one of their favorites, or maybe the title triggers something in my subconscious. Regardless it is all fun and that is what I’m doing with Shepherd. I’m trying to make online book discovery more of an experience rather than a chore.
I started by asking authors to recommend five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood. We feature the author and their book at the top of that list. The goal is to give readers five delicious book recommendations while getting the author’s book in front of the perfect audience. Thus, the topic, theme, or mood should be near the author’s book in order to make a good pairing.
Martin made a great list on the best dark fiction books that explore the hidden shadows of humanity if you want to see the end result.
For authors, it is critical that your book matches the topic, theme, or mood of your book list in order to be effective at selling your book. If your book is about an alien invasion set in 2048 and your book recommendation list is about “the best books on D-Day” nobody is going to be interested in your book.
Once an author makes a list, we go to work. Our job is to get your list in front of readers and create an amazing book browsing experience for them. I should note, we are only one year old and frantically working to build more features for readers and authors. Here are a few of the ways we help readers discover books while helping authors sell their book.
We give readers a way to browse books based on a topic and to keep following their curiosity to related topics. For example, if a reader lands on our bookshelf about the best unicorn books they can browse books and book lists connected with unicorns. As well as keep following that onward to bookshelves about sea monsters, goblins, magic, or imagination. Later this year we will add filters so that readers can show only unicorn books for adults, or only unicorn books for age 10, or only unicorn books that are science fiction. We want to empower them to find what they are looking for while keeping a healthy dose of serendipity in the process.
We also have search, although it is not about finding what you want, but rather discovering what you did not know you needed. Readers can search for a favorite book, a favorite author, or a topic you are interested in and get recommendations for where to start browsing.
Go to Shepherd.com and type in vampire. You will be suggested book lists like this:
As well as bookshelves about vampires and dark comedy. The system that powers this uses machine learning to look for similarities but at the heart of everything we do are humans picking their favorite books. You can read a big breakdown of how that system works here.
This year we will launch a new recommendation system, a better UX for bookshelves, genre pages, genre filters, and much more. After we get the base features in place I will start bringing in new and unique ways to find books. I am testing two new methods with readers and I will share them with authors on the newsletter this month or next (one is aimed at helping fiction authors and the other non-fiction authors). We also have a newsletter for authors where we share traffic details, what we are learning, and give early access to new features to authors. If you want to take part email us at forauthors@shepherd.com and check out our website for authors here.
Ben Fox is a serial entrepreneur who loves to read. He lives in live Portugal with his wife and his five-year-old son.