Promise. This is not going to be a blog about my latest thriller. Today, I’m more interested in how you decide to purchase a book or borrow it from the library.
Do you decide after reading a review in the mainstream media? Or because the novel is by one of your very favorite authors? Or because the book is a featured deal on Bookbub? Or because you’re looking for a certain type of book in a genre you enjoy?
I’ve been thinking about this ever since Ben Fox emailed me back in August. Ben emailed out of the blue to tell me he is the founder of a new website, shepherd.com, which he hopes “will eventually rival Goodreads.”
Shepherd.com
Here is the home page of the website which describes itself as a “book search and recommendation” website.
Ben (below) describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur.” He said he wants his website to be like a visit to the world’s best bookstore. He wanted my help to recommend five books on any subject I was passionate about.
The way I understood his concept when he explained it further was this: you walk into a really great bookstore where the sales staff really love and know books and you say something like : “I just finished reading Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls. Totally loved that jaw-dropping twist… Can you recommend any other books like it?”
Except that on shepherd.com, you can just type the title of that last great novel you read into the search box and, if you type in Pretty Girls, you will get some book lists that look like this:
If you click on the first book list, “the best contemporary suspense novels with jaw dropping twists” it will take you to my page on shepherd.com
This is where my page on shepherd.com tells you who I am, and what I’ve written:
Also why I’m passionate about suspense novels with jaw dropping twists; which are my five favorite such novels — and why.
Check out my page here.
You could also type in a subject like “serial killers” and get a whole bunch of leads like this:
Fun Ways To Find Amazing Books
What Ben Fox aims to do and has been doing since April 2021 is contacting authors and experts and asking for their personal book recommendations. The website “offers readers a direct connection to large numbers of active authors” by introducing the author, one of their published books and listing five favorite related books.
It’s what Ben Fox and his team call “human-powered book discovery.” Recommendations come in the form of a “narrowly focused list that’s tied to the author’s expertise.”
Jane Friedman, publishing and blogging expert, who featured the new website in her August 2022 Hot Sheet industry newsletter wrote: “Shepherd is seeking authors who can express what they love about a book.”
Website Quality
Naturally, being me, I chose a topic that was almost impossible to write. How do you write about jaw-dropping twists without giving away the twist and why it’s so jaw-dropping???
I think I managed it in the end. But that was after I did some online research about Ben Fox and shepherd.com. As Jane Friedman added in her newsletter: “During the early days of shepherd.com, Fox reached out proactively to authors and publishers to get things moving. But […] many automatically assumed his site was some kind of scam.”
Friedman concluded in her feature: “He (Ben Fox) has been able to overcome that challenge with authors , not least because of the evident quality of the site.”
As of a couple of months ago, Fox’s start-up site recorded more than 100,000 visitors per month, and 6,000 book recommendation pages.
Fox has also said that he wants “to help authors bump into new readers who are more likely to be interested in their book.”
Already, topics and subjects listed on the website are getting indexed by Google spiders. As of this last weekend if you googled: “novels with jaw-dropping twists” my shepherd.com page would have appeared on the very first page of the search results.
For Authors
Authors who are interested in the website can access more information about it here.