If anyone is interested let me know what you think. The goal is to create an online experience that is like wandering through a bookstore and seeing little notes about which books are the staff's favorites.
One way that people discover books is by listening to / reading about authors they enjoy, talking about other books and authors that they enjoy.
There’s an NLP problem in there for sure, because they like to both bash and praise certain people.
It’d be amazing to have a searchable graph of “Tolstoi likes Turgenev likes Gustave Flaubert”. There could even be a time aspect to it, as certain writers hated or loved their contemporaries as time went on.
At present, authors and literary people have these graphs in their heads, it would be nice to write them all down and expose them. At present it’s quite laborious to bootstrap such a mental graph by yourself, as a student or hobbyist.
Oh I am so excited about NLP!!! Toward July the backend is getting more details around the type of topics so I can start training models eventually.
You nailed it, I can't wait to get that going and start playing :)
[1] Do we really need both "Anglo-Saxon England" and "Anglo-Saxon Britain"? Or three different "Norse Mythology" topics and two different "Norse Myths" topics and a "Norse Mythology and Polytheism" topic?
The cool thing is that those recommendations are vastly different depending on the person making them. So I do want the same topic from different angles and then I am going to change how they are viewed to make that more useful. As this scales I will be drastically changing how that is displayed on the homepage and topic pages.
For example, here is a future way to get books recommended on a topic one at a time... kinda like book dating: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages
Self-written mini-bios are not the answer here; the question "what makes this recommender different from the others?" is not something the recommender can answer in isolation, even if they're being maximally honest.
I wanted to add to others suggestions to consider adding more genre-like categories. I realize they aren’t as specific as “world war 2”, etc, but I think you will miss out without the common popular genres there. For example, “best fantasy in 2021” or “best cooking book 2021”, etc, overlap with tons of interests and seem missing. Maybe write down every genre in Amazon search and see how your groupings compare? Just my 2 cents!
Ya good point, when I looked at search volume I was surprised how many time sensitive searches there were. I would like to rank for those eventually but I am still playing with the best way to do that and make sure what people land on is specifically what they want. The Amazon tip is a good one, thanks!
Curious to know - how did you curate these?
With just me I should be able to scale up to 300 new lists each month, and I am looking to further accelerate that.
It is a pretty easy sell as it is win/win for them. They recommend five books on a topic they already know well and then I feature them and their book alongside the list forever. Plus, what we are finding in early user testing is that by giving those little recommendations readers get to peek in their head and it increases interest in their book.
Half my long term goal with this website is to give authors better ways to market themselves and their books. There is a growing trend that authors have to do full time marketing and I worry that a lot of authors spend more time on marketing than their craft. And, for new authors it is a catch 22 to try to get that first book noticed.
Not to pry on your secret sauce, but if you're open would be good to hear how you're trying to do the discovery part differently.
To start, I am focusing on asking authors/experts for their 5 book recommendations on a topic they are passionate about and know well. Here are some examples of how this is playing out:
The Best Books On The Soviet Space Program And The Space Race -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-soviet-space-program
The Best Books On The Ocean And Seas -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-ocean-and-seas
The Best Books On Content Creation And Content Marketing -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/content-creation-and-content...
Then I will relate those book lists to each other both distantly and closely in order to help a reader follow their curiosity through the website, kinda like walking through aisles of books: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists
Then toward July/August I will add Topic pages to help people find books on a topic they are interested in like World War 2, Grief, Startups, and so on: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages
My goal is as I build up the content that next year I will do two things:
1. Start playing with NLP to create even more unique ways to find books, such as browsing a timeline of Japan and inserting people and events and books/book-lists into
2. Start asking users for their 1-3 favorite books of the year. I want to make this an incredibly high quality vote that is limited. And, use that to help add more books to the mix.
ben@shepherd.com, hit me up as I could use feedback :), Thanks, Ben
I bought it for mid 5 figures, so pretty good deal.
There is a growing trend that authors have to become their own marketing team. That concerns me because it is very difficult to do and it takes time away from writing. One of my long-term goals is to make it easier for authors to market themselves and I am looking forward to working on this challenge.
How am I doing that?
Right now... trying to help them zero in on their target audience. So if they wrote a book about the Battle of Midway, I want to get them to recommend 5 books around that subject and then feed readers into their recommendation. As readers not only meet their book they get to see their voice and expertise. In early user testing I found these recommendations increase interest in the author and their book because you get to peek in their head.
Next? Full channels based on topics like WW2, Grief, Anxiety, Startups, etc. The goal being to give authors channels with interested readers to serve their book and book lists within. Details here and hoping to ship this end of July: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages
Lots more, but need to get the flywheel spinning.
I could talk a lot more about this, feel free to email me :)
There are so many great books that are also unknown, and I am trying to help people diversify their reading material and eventually map out people's "book dna" in order to do better recommendations. I am really worried that new authors have an even harder time to get traction than they did 10 years ago, even if a big publishing house picks them up it looks like most of the marketing burden is on them. I want to see if I can help in that department while giving readers better ways to find amazing books.