Today’s edition covers:

• My 10 favorite book lists for November…

• What I am working on at Shepherd.com…

• What am I reading?

Want to share your 3 favorite reads of the year?

Get a beautiful page like this showing your top 3 reads like this.

Plus, your votes go into our Best Books of 2024! This helps other readers find books they will love and highlights authors you want more readers to find.

Create your account and share your favorites here 😀 .

My 10 Favorite Book Lists For November…

What is Shepherd building now?

Where am I at?

It has been a long couple of weeks, and I am worn out.

We’ve worked like crazy to fix bugs and improve the Best Books of 2024 feature. After one more week, we should be done.

Then, we will build a basic referral program to reward authors and readers who invite their friends to participate.

Soon, I will start telling many more people about it, and hopefully, they will share their 3 favorite reads of the year. We’ve got ~800 submissions so far, and my goal is to reach 5,000 submissions by January 31st.

What are we working on?

We are adding widgets around the website to advertise the Best Books of 2024. I hope we will attract many more readers and encourage them to participate 🙃 .

Adding book series pages

We paused this to focus on the Best Books of 2024, but we are picking it back up shortly. I still think we will finish this by the end of the month.

It will allow you to browse different book series, integrate the concept into the website, and be notified when a new book in a series you follow is out. However, we might need to do additional work to improve the quality of book data (a big challenge in the book industry).

I am replacing the ugly display ads with book ads!

I turned off all the ugly display ads, and while this makes me nervous, I am happy to see the website as it is meant to look. The revenue from the display ads pays for most of our server and software costs, and I hope we can make that up by selling book ads to authors and our new reader membership program. 

Highlights from the build blog:

• Build blog: Hi Google, please stop 💩 the bed: a desperate plea from the independent web.

• Build blog: Intense 3 weeks: How do we get readers to share their 3 favorite reads of the year?

What am I reading?

I just finished...

I am reading...

• Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World is a fascinating account of a group that is part of our DNA. Yet we know little about them because they left little physical evidence.

• In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté —I am reading this as part of my book club with my dad and brother. It will be challenging, and I look forward to something outside my regular reading habits.

• The Lion’s Game by Nelson Demille - I just read book one and loved it, so I'm jumping into book 2 as he moves into anti-terrorism.

What have I been up to outside of Shepherd?

My son was off for two weeks, so we drove up to the Pyrenees mountains for a week of rest. It was a good break, and we had a lot of fun 😀 .

Here is a picture from a hike in that area.