Revolutionizing Book Discoverability with Ben Fox of Shepherd.com

In this episode, Beth and Lisa welcome Ben Fox, a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Shepherd.com, an innovative platform aiming to revolutionize online book discoverability. As avid readers and critics of Goodreads, the hosts delve into Shepherd.com's unique approach to connecting readers with books through curated lists and positive recommendations.

 Key Topics Discussed:

1. Introduction to Shepherd.com: Ben explains how Shepherd.com introduces curiosity and serendipity into the online book-finding experience, mirroring the feel of browsing in a local bookstore.

 2. The Concept of Positive Recommendations: Unlike Goodreads, Shepherd.com focuses exclusively on positive book recommendations, avoiding review bombing and negativity.

 3. Leveraging Shepherd.com for Emerging Authors: Ben outlines how authors can use Shepherd.com to gain visibility and connect with their target audience by sharing their favorite books related to their writing themes.

 4. The Role of Shepherd.com in the Publishing Ecosystem: Discussion on how Shepherd.com serves as a tool for authors and readers, fostering a community of book lovers and providing an alternative to traditional book discovery methods.

 5. Challenges Faced by New Authors: Ben talks about the challenges in the publishing industry, emphasizing the importance of staying optimistic and persistent.

 6. Future Developments: Sneak peek into 'Book DNA', an upcoming project by Shepherd.com aimed at enhancing book discovery based on reader preferences and book characteristics.

- Visit Shepherd.com to discover new books and authors.

- Support Writers with Wrinkles by subscribing, following, and recommending the podcast.

- Tune in on January 29th for a special top five deep dive episode.

Transcript

Beth McMullen: 0:31

Hi friends, I'm Beth McMullen and I'm Lisa Schmid, and we're the co-hosts of Writers with Wrinkles. This is season three, episode four, and today we are excited to welcome Ben Fox to the show. Ben is a serial entrepreneur who has founded numerous companies and a man who loves to read and who, with shepherdcom, intends to build a company that will rival Goodreads and bring online book discoverability to the next level. We here at Writers with Wrinkles aren't super fans of Goodreads, so we are all in with this idea of an alternative and welcome Ben.

Ben Fox: 1:07

Thank you, thanks for having me.

Beth McMullen: 1:09

We are excited that you are here. So I am a total sucker for best of lists. If I see a best of list, doesn't even matter what their ranking it could be laundry detergent and I'm like, oh, what's number one? Why is it number one? Who ranked it? I'm obsessed with all those things. So when I discovered shepherdcom, I was like this this is my universe, this is my world, these are my people. I was really. It really appealed to that part of me and I use it frequently to find new books. So I know we probably have listeners who don't know what it is. So if you could explain a little bit about what shepherdcom is for those who don't know and how you were inspired to start it, yeah, so shepherd is entirely focused on helping readers find the books that they didn't know they needed.

Ben Fox: 2:03

So it's really about introducing curiosity and serendipity into the book. Finding experience online and the feeling we're trying to create is like when you're wandering around your favorite local bookstore, where there's kind of endless possibilities and you get excited and you kind of stumble into a book that resonates with you and you take it home. So we're trying to create that online because of course you can go to your local bookstore and you should, but we're hoping to do more online, both to help authors and readers create that type of feeling. And I've always wanted to do something with books but I could never find a unique angle or something I was doing that was different. And then I can't remember the bookstore, which I wish I could.

Ben Fox: 2:44

But I walked into some bookstore on my travels and the staff at the bookstore had put little index cards below books that they personally loved and it was just this really beautiful thing where you're walking around all these books. But then it pulled your attention to like hey, bob loves sci-fi and he loved this book and it's about an alien sheep hybrid or something crazy. But it was a really cool way to kind of connect with another human over a book. And knowing how hard it is for authors to find readers, I realized, hey, this could be a cool way for authors, who generally are people who love books, to connect with readers while kind of introducing them to the reader over a book they both are going to love, hopefully.

Beth McMullen: 3:26

I love the and of what I'll just call the rabbit hole effect of shepherdcom, where I even if I just looked up before we got on. I looked up I had done a list for you a while ago about spy books for kids and I looked up the list and then underneath that it has all these other adjacent lists that would be interesting potentially to somebody who was searching for either my name, my book, my list, and I mean I could be. I could be gone for days in that. So I mean it's really I think it does mimic as well as can be done the idea of physically walking around a bookstore and just having your eye caught by things that you would never see otherwise, which is so interesting to think about.

Lisa Schmid: 4:20

So I have a question. Can people who are coming on and visiting the website Do you have any reviews, or is it just lists?

Ben Fox: 4:28

It is just lists and it is entirely positive recommendations. So this is it's kind of my whole goal here is to collect high quality votes of different types. So with one format, we ask authors for their five favorite books around a topic, theme or mood. With another format, we ask them for their three favorite reads in the last year and the whole idea here is I don't like how good reads is broken for many reasons, but good reads is really bad about, obviously, review bombing, about negativity, about really silly reviews sometimes. So the goal here is just positive recommendations like no, no reason to kick a book that you don't like just because it's a mismatch or whatever other weird reason. So, yeah, we're entirely focused on the positivity side of things.

Lisa Schmid: 5:15

Well, I think authors and readers are ready for that switch. I mean, there's so much clutter and noise out in the world, and to veer away from the negative is a welcome thing, so I love that.

Beth McMullen: 5:29

Good reads was dead to me when I saw a one star review for a book that I wrote that they had the reader had purchased from Amazon and the cover was torn of the book. So they gave me a one star review and I remember thinking to myself like this is not nothing on this site is helpful to me as an author. Okay, we'll stop bagging on good reads for a minute here. Lisa, do you want to jump into the question?

Lisa Schmid: 5:58

Yes, Okay, so this is something our listeners are going to be excited about. How can emerging authors leverage shepherdcom to gain visibility and connect with their target audience?

Ben Fox: 6:12

For authors, a lot of what we're doing is connecting them to readers through a shared love of books, and the first format we launched with which is our main format right now, which is we ask authors to share five of their favorite books around a topic, theme or mood that is close to their book, and the entire idea here is that you're going to share five books you love.

Ben Fox: 6:34

That is also going to attract the readers that are most likely to be interested in your book that you're pairing with that list.

Ben Fox: 6:42

And so you know, for example, if I have a history book about World War II, I might do the best books you know on the biggest battles in World War II. If I have a middle-grader book about magic, I might do the best books for eight-year-olds who are just, you know, getting comfortable reading about magic, wizards and monsters. And the whole idea here is that you're creating a list that when somebody lands on it, they're going to get to know you through your recommendations. We have a pretty specific format around the very short recommendation meant to expose your personality, your expertise, you know, depending on what angle you're coming from, and then that helps drive interest back to your book and you. That's our first format and generally every format. We only have two right now but we're going to be coming out with more. They're all designed to help authors kind of connect with readers in different ways but help them introduce their book to that same group of readers.

Beth McMullen: 7:37

I love that. Can you give me a job? Can I come and work for Shepardcom?

Lisa Schmid: 7:41

I know.

Beth McMullen: 7:42

I'm serious, just give me a job. I could be, I could just live in this universe of lists and books. It's kind of my sweet spot.

Lisa Schmid: 7:51

So what was your background that helped you Like? Obviously you must have some kind of computer programming. You know how did you put this together, because it's a very intricate site. How did you do all this?

Ben Fox: 8:05

Yeah, so my background is marketing and tech for a long time building websites and other random things. I guess I've always built a lot of complex websites. I don't code so much. I only did that briefly when I was young. I'm hoping maybe eventually to move back towards that a little bit. But we have like a part-time developer who helps us build. We have a part-time designer who makes everything look pretty. You know, we have a small team. We have a couple part-time editors that help us kind of shepherd all the authors missions through and we have a couple people that help with data entry and just running some day-to-day stuff. So we're I call it, small but mighty, because we do have a pretty decent number of people that kind of help put this all together.

Lisa Schmid: 8:45

Wow, so this isn't just you anymore. This is like in the beginning it was probably just you and it's grown yeah.

Ben Fox: 8:52

Yeah, yeah, there's two full-time people and everybody else is kind of part-time, based on just you know. You know, 10 to 20 hours a week, usually for most part-time people. But yeah, it's a lot to handle with how many authors submissions and we do try to do some editing. Of course we do content guidelines, that kind of thing. There's some little bit of rules in there. So, yeah, it's grown to be a little bit bigger, yeah.

Lisa Schmid: 9:15

Well, congratulations, that's exciting.

Beth McMullen: 9:17

Thanks, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised, I think people are. Once they figure out what it is, then I'm sure you get people who become loyal and repeat visitors to the website to use the service. The next question I had originally given you a question that was a little different from what I'm going to ask, because, based on shepherdcom, say, you have an author who does a list and puts it onto your site. What are some ways that you're then promoting that list or giving the author tools to promote their own list? So that again about discoverability so that people who are not necessarily return visitors to shepherdcom will see this list and then go there. So do you have tools built into this system that the author can access in order to get that list in front of more readers or potential book buyers?

Ben Fox: 10:15

Yeah, we're still pretty new and we're pretty bootstrapped because there's not a ton of money in books so we are very lean, so we don't have like a login system.

Beth McMullen: 10:25

You don't have to tell us that.

Ben Fox: 10:29

Yeah, so we're very lean in a sense that, because we don't have a ton of resources, a Parktime developer is great, but we're pretty focused. Okay, how do we grow things that are going to grow readers? Because that's ultimately what's going to help authors. So I always say that and I like to preface I'm not Oprah and I'm not Jesus. A lot of authors want that to be created. I tell them that we are one of a hundred things they have to do online and we might add we might talk about this later. I have no idea what the other 99 are. So, to get back to the point, we are long and steady or we are. Yeah, we are steady traffic month after month, year after year. We are not a burst of traffic. So, like our top list, our most popular list last month had 2500 readers getting. You know, come in and see it and that was a big fight because of Napoleon and the movie got a lot of stuff. And then you get a lot of traffic. Most of our, even our top 20 list. They're usually getting 400 to 1000 readers and I'm going to do a big break breakdown of this type of data for the FAQ. But a lot of this is okay, you're getting in front of, say, 50 readers every month who are the most likely readers for your book, it's better. It's like a little bit of building that word of mouth, because I believe the big part of this is you have to get the word of mouth going. You have to get your first 50 or 100 reviews in Amazon and then you can start building that, if your book has kind of that magic spark, and keep going.

Ben Fox: 11:52

So in terms of what we have to promote the specific list, we really recommend that authors promote it on their social media to their audiences and then we try to amplify that. We don't have much of a social media audience because we're pretty focused I'll talk about it in a second on search engine traffic. So we give that to them to share. We give them some images they can use. We also build a lot of that into it, so they just have to share it and not do much else. We generally recommend they can share it multiple times a year. Social media rarely shows your stuff to your followers. It's generally every time you share it they're going to show it to somewhere between five and, if you're lucky on something like Instagram, 40%. So we really recommend they share it multiple times. So that's generally all we tell authors to do. Is they're part of it.

Ben Fox: 12:38

Our part of it is we do a lot of external and internal marketing of the list. So externally, if your list is a good candidate, we work to try to get it ranked in Google. So if somebody is out there searching for the best folks on the battle of Midway, we're going to try to rank your list, especially if you're an expert. That doesn't work for all books, of course. Especially fiction is a lot more muddled.

Ben Fox: 12:58

People don't search so much for these long tail phrases. They're searching mostly for best sci-fi fantasy. So the other thing we do is inside our site, once somebody is in it, we have, I think, right now, eight or nine ways to help readers find your book list through everything else. So when somebody goes to, we have a whole category of pages called bookshelves and these are big category pages like sci-fi fantasy, first graders, 10 year olds, that when they're browsing through all these books we are showing what list that book came from to hopefully cause them to jump to that list. And we do that same concept again and again. I won't go too deep, I'll pass there. We have a lot in our FAQ, but everything we invent on the site, it's meant to drive more interest to the list.

Lisa Schmid: 13:44

Do authors pay to do this, or is this something that you just? It's free for them. They can reach out to shepherdcom and ask to do a list.

Ben Fox: 13:53

Yeah, it's entirely free. We have a website that talks more about just what we offer at forauthorsshepardcom. It'll always be free, cause it's really kind of a group work where you're giving us awesome book recommendations and an exchange. We're trying to help you get in front of readers forever. So, yeah, definitely free. We do have a founding member program where authors can join if they want to support what we're building. It's $50 a year and the idea that just goes towards building new features for authors and readers. That's about all we have, and they get some special perks. For example, they get like a new book launch program and some little things like that. But our formats are always gonna be free for authors because it's designed to help everybody.

Lisa Schmid: 14:35

This is such an awesome thing.

Ben Fox: 14:37

We generally try to make sure it's only gonna take about 45 minutes is our hope, or sometimes it take longer. The downside is not too much. It's put it out there and just keep in mind that most of our lists are getting between 25 to 50 visitors a month and as we grow we hope to increase that and we're always trying to invent new features using the existing data that are cooler ways to kind of browse book data. So like I would really like to come out with additional formats in 24. We're kind of seeing what we're gonna be able to do this year. But yeah, there's not really too much downside and just I love when people have a realistic expectation, because this is an Oprah, it really is okay. This is one of many things I can do, but it's easy and I don't have to do any marketing. So I think that's one of the hardest things for authors is they're expected now to be full-time marketers, which is very difficult.

Lisa Schmid: 15:29

I'm kind of thinking you're better than Oprah. Okay, no, I don't know about that.

Beth McMullen: 15:36

It didn't take me that long to do my list and one of the things that I think listeners should be aware of, because oftentimes aspiring writers are looking for comps for what they're trying to write in order to see what the marketability is, and Lisa and I have talked about this with this picture book project that we're doing. What are the comps and what is the marketability of those comps? This website is serving up to you this list of comps, just on a silver platter, so you find a book that you think is similar. Say, you're writing a spy book for middle grade, you can search for my Mrs Smith Spy School series. See the books that I list in there. Those are all comps for you, because what I did in my list was I was building out on a theme that was spy books for kids.

Beth McMullen: 16:26

If you're writing a spy book for kids, find my list. There are your comps. So I think you have data and information in here beyond just, I like this kind of book and I want to find other books and I want online discovery to make more of a bookstore feel. I think you've got data in there that authors can use to create a better pitch, to be able to present a more coherent effort to an agent or a publisher or whoever it is that you're putting your stuff in front of. So I think it's just important for listeners to keep that in mind too. It's a little added thing that you can get out of shepherdcom that will make your life easier.

Lisa Schmid: 17:08

You know, what else I love is that you know, especially with middle grade, like it, or even just like when you go into indie bookstores, there's only so much real estate in a bookstore so you only catch like a glimpse of kind of what's new or what's like a tried and true, like there's always going to be, you know, a Harry Potter section or whatever.

Lisa Schmid: 17:27

So this it feels like this is a place that readers can go to and really browse what's out there that is in their particular interest, that they like to read. Like I love ghost stories and as you're going, as I'm going through you know the local Barnes and Noble or Ruby's and Folsom, I'm looking for ghost stories. But again, there's only so much space and to find what I want, and it's amazing because I'm in the business of knowing what's out there and I don't know what's out there, you know, except for the people I follow, and I'm pretty darn sure there are more authors out there. Okay, so let's like jump into the next question what are some of the biggest challenges you think new authors face in today's market, and how does shepherdcom help in addressing these challenges? I think we've already kind of talked about that, but if there's anything that you want to add.

Ben Fox: 18:21

Yeah, I mean I think the biggest one that I would throw out there broadly is just pessimism. So don't be pessimistic, because your book selling is so rare, it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of luck. I think people really discount luck the more I've talked to hundreds and authors and thousands of email conversations. But that's one thing is, I think people need to know that it just is hard to get your book getting any kind of steady stream of sales going and just keep trying, like I'm trying to get one way that they can do that and I really you need a lot of ways to add up because of people online are going to look at that A lot of books before they pick one. I mean, on our site we can see, okay, how many people are browsing until they click to go look at a bookstore, because we're really trying to sell them on the premise and then we want them to go to the bookstore to go read the full description and they're going to read reviews more than likely. So, yeah, I would just try to stay optimistic. It's not a very practical one, but I talked to so many authors who expect their book to fly off the shelf and so on, but they don't realize that there's a lot of other factors and that's mostly a lot of luck. There's a healthy amount. If you really approach it with the business mindset, of course, that can really aid that. But if you've written the story, just be happy it's out there. I can give a lot more advice on a very micro basis, depending on the book.

Ben Fox: 19:43

I think that's what I've also learned from talking to authors is there is not much I can tell anyone to do on a broad basis besides shepherd, and then I can tell you that bookbub works, but it costs a little money and the readers are generally people that like free things and there's some downfalls there. It's really sad because I talked to a lot of authors. I don't have anything else that works like that I can recommend to anybody. There's not any other sites that are trying to help authors. There's some blogs out there that are doing cool stuff. In your micro area of wherever your book is. There's some history websites that are doing cool stuff. There's a lot of problems with a lot of those as well. There's some cool stuff happening with newsletters, but it's a mess right now for the internet for authors.

Lisa Schmid: 20:27

Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. And then also, just for anybody who's listening, that maybe has a new book coming out. I know when my first book came out, I was like so excited and I'm like, oh my God, there's going to be so many sales because it's new and it's fun. And then I went and I looked at my sales on author central or whatever on Amazon and it was such a cold dose of reality that I just was like deflated and I had been that person that spun out and was doing every blog and everything and promoting everywhere on social media and I'm like, and that's what I got and that's probably all my friends. So it's one of those things I think just set your expectations and also find the places that are most effective for you, that aren't going to be time sucks and that you're going to spin out and it's not going to be beneficial and it just. It sounds like your website is nothing but positive and I can hardly wait to do it for heart and souls.

Beth McMullen: 21:29

I have one more question for you. I was reading on your website yesterday and you may not be able to answer this, because it said that it was still a little bit secret A project called BookDNA. Is that still secret? Are you allowed to talk about that, or at least give us some hints about what's coming?

Ben Fox: 21:46

Yeah, totally so. The first. The site's about two and a half years old and we've really focused on working with authors on this first format. We just launched our second format and so what I'm trying to move forward is now a little bit more trying to talk to readers on what books resonate with them, because I don't want to do book tracking. I think that Storygraph and hardcoverapp I love both of those. They're both run by great people and they're doing a great job kind of replacing Goodreads as social and book tracking and everything else, and I'm focused purely on discovery.

Ben Fox: 22:25

But one of the ways I want to do discovery is I would love to ask readers also what their favorites are and use that to help identify books that have that magic spark, because I don't want to get into a top 100 list I want to go. Part of what I'm trying to do is I want to help authors grow up the ladder. So I want to help that first bit where they're trying to get some word of mouth going past their family and friends, and then I want to help them get a little bit more through our other format and then if their book is resonating with people, I want to help identify it so that they can grow, because right now, the only way you can really do that is with ads, even if you have a good book at some point, unless you just get straight up lucky. So I'm trying to grow that. So one of the things I want to do is I want to go to readers and I'll ask them OK, tell me about your favorite three books you read in 2023. Because I just did this with authors and we asked them to just give us a little mini recommendation.

Ben Fox: 23:20

But for readers, I really want to ask them more about the things that resonated with that book. What did it make you feel? What did you love most about that book? Was that world building? Was that the characters? Did you learn something? I'm trying to identify what makes book DNA For me. I love characters that I cry once the book is over because I'm sad to leave them. I want to see that character grow, learn something. I find that empowering.

Ben Fox: 23:46

So there's things like that that I want to try to build a format out so that not only can I bring that data in is I can also then ask readers OK, what are your favorite genres, topics, what do you love about books? And get their profile and help match them against other readers. Because that's a lot of what we're doing behind the scenes right now is we are trying to make human groupings of books so that we have that plus this other data and then we can help you find books you will adore and absolutely love, but from a much deeper pool. So, for example, I love the Bosch series. I love crime drama like that and I love all his books. I have read all his books. I want to find something else. I would love to go into Shepard and say, look, some of my favorite crime books are Lincoln Lawyer, the Bosch series. Now tell me other people that pick that as one of their three favorite readers for the year, or their favorite crime books on a future format. You tell me what else they're reading.

Ben Fox: 24:45

And so we're trying to get that, but make it a very high quality vote, because I think this is one area that Amazon has been decent. But the problem is they look at all sales. So it's very much if I buy 10 books and I like six of them and the other four. They're still factoring that in with their algorithms and they're moving more towards ads. And then you have Goodreads and others that are kind of doing this, but they are once again more book tracking, so they just haven't played with this kind of ideas as much as maybe I wish they would. That was a big reason I started this fight is because I would like to meet more books. I was always struggling to find sci-fi that was good, for example. So that's where I'm headed over the next couple of years.

Beth McMullen: 25:24

I love that idea Because I mean, so much of what we read is word of mouth, and to create an online discoverability angle for word of mouth, I think is pretty cool, and I am going to be excited to find more books that way, because I have a group of people who they recommend stuff to me and I read it and we all have those friends that we rely on and when they say this is a great book, you go and you get it, or they hand it to you and you end up reading it. So to be able to kind of expand that beyond those people that you're just meeting in real life or know in real life, I think is a really cool way to go. I'm excited to see how that unfolds over the coming months.

Ben Fox: 26:12

And we took our first step with the favorite three reads by authors, because it's kind of setting up authors to become curated book resources and then we're going to have other people as well. But my hope there is in a couple of years we can kind of grow into where we have. Maybe we have 4000 book recommenders and then we can kind of help people hone in on who speaks to them. And we've already kind of we just started adding people can subscribe now to specific recommendations via email. It doesn't send anything yet.

Ben Fox: 26:43

We're working towards that, but I was saying something we launched this last year to start testing. So the hope is we can do that with email and on the web. But email is a really big part of that building that relationship with the readers and that would help all authors because it'd be great to have, like you know, I think we have maybe 5000 independent bookstores in the US. We need 5000 independent book recommenders who all have different characteristics, because right now I think all we have is Amazon's editorial staff do some picking to help illuminate books that they think should be shown, and we have that same functionality at, you know, the New York Times and a lot of other little publications, which is fantastic, but it'd be great to get some, you know, more human level, wider array, and I sometimes I worry about PRs effect on some of those other websites.

Beth McMullen: 27:31

Yeah, for sure. I like the idea of stuff coming to my inbox too, because it removes that one step of people having to think oh you know, I need a book, I'm going to go here and look for one. If it's showing up in your inbox, it's automatic, it's like right in your face and you just say, oh, yeah, click. So that, I think, will be a really excellent feature, and I am going to be curious to see how it affects the traffic of your website in the coming months. So, ben, we could keep you here all day chatting about books, because we're all book people and when you meet book people you're like please just stay and talk to books with me, but we know you have things to do. So thank you so much for being here and sharing all about shepherdcom with us. We are very grateful.

Lisa Schmid: 28:19

Thank you, it was a pleasure and listeners.

Beth McMullen: 28:21

I'll put a link to shepherdcom and the podcast notes so you can check it out, and we hope you will. And, as always, thank you for tuning in. Please visit our Writers with Wrinkles link tree or the podcast notes and find out how to support the show by subscribing, following and recommending. And we will see you again next week, on January 29th, for a top five deep dive episode that you won't want to miss. And so, until then, happy reading, writing and listening.