Have you discovered Shepherd.com? If you enjoy reading books and are looking for some great recommendations or are an author who would like to find another way to promote your work, check out this site created by entrepreneur Ben Fox as an alternative to Amazon and Goodreads.
Fox explains his vision for the website. “I want Shepherd to be a place that makes book discovery fun online. I want it to evoke the same feeling that you get when you wander around your local bookstore, but in vastly different ways given the limitless nature of the internet. And, while doing this, I want to help authors bump into new readers who are the most likely to be interested in their book. It is a hard world for authors and I want to make it easier for them to connect with readers in some cool ways.”
Shepherd.com launched in April 2021. In January 2022, Fox and his team launched a new front page, search, and topic sections called bookshelves. Bookshelves help visitors browse through books with subjects such as World War 2, dragons, grief, and many other topics. Fox says that “The next step is to bring in genres so that on the bookshelves you can filter to see only historical fiction, history, or other genre types. And then we will also add genre pages where you can filter by topic. So you can be on a science fiction page and filter to see only books about cyborgs or artificial intelligence or other fun ways to discover amazing books. Once we have that base in place, I have a lot of plans to create more new and unique ways to find books. Slowly but surely, we will make book browsing online less like buying toothpaste :).”
The way Shepherd.com works is that an author can submit short recommendations of five book titles on a particular subject. For instance, I have a cozy mystery series, The Cobble Cove mysteries, that feature a librarian as the main character. I recommended five other first books of cozy mystery series that also include libraries and librarians. Here’s the link to my page on Shepherd.com: https://shepherd.com/best-books/mystery-series-featuring-libraries-and-librarians
Here is a list of a few other book recommendations featured on Shepherd.com:
https://shepherd.com/best-books/historical-mysteries-to-enlighten-your-imagination
https://shepherd.com/best-books/mysteries-set-in-space
https://shepherd.com/best-books/mystery-when-you-really-want-to-hug-the-detect
Shepherd.com isn’t only for mysteries or fiction. Here are some other lists:
https://shepherd.com/best-books/on-space-exploration
https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-history-of-paris
https://shepherd.com/best-books/changing-how-you-see-history
Shepherd.com had 67,000+ unique visitors last month. Fox works with a team that helps with different aspects of the site. Learn more about the Shepherd team here: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/team, and check out the exciting plans for Shepherd.com as outlined in its 2022 Roadmap: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/roadmap
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