Upgrade our Book Boost Perk for Founding Authors

What does this feature do?

This is one of our big perks for Founding Authors; their yearly membership funds Shepherd's development. Depending on the membership plan, we place authors in front of 100 to 200 of the most likely readers for their book each month as long as they are members. Our goal is to give them extra promotion as a thank-you for their support in building Shepherd.

What are we adding?

Improved Ad Designs

This will improve our ad design as we test how to best pull readers into a book they don't know about. One of our big goals is to figure out how to sell the book as an experience. Booksellers still treat books like a product like toothpaste or gravy mix (which is a crime against humanity IMO).

When "Show book" is clicked, the window expands to show the book's full description along with preview/buy links.

We track engagement with these ads and are constantly working to learn and improve them.

Automate Our Stats Email

I have been sending this email manually, but I can't keep up. We will build an automated process to do this so that authors get stats on their Book Boost ad(s) every 2 weeks to a month.

In the long term, I want to build a dashboard for authors, but we don't currently have the financial resources to do that. Once we hit 2,500+ members, we will add that.

Improve Ad Placement

We will improve where ads show up and integrate them into the pages better.

Improve our backend system

We've got a ton of work on the backend to improve how we collect stats and more.

Status

This feature is not yet started.

Why is this update important?

• This is a massively important perk for our Founding Authors. I want to keep them very happy with what Shepherd is building for them so they keep supporting us. Their funding is how we pay our team and build all the features on the website for readers and authors.
• Part of our mission is to understand how to best pitch books to readers, and this data feeds into everything we build. Books are an experience and we need to learn how to sell the experience that book brings each individual. Selling books like toothpaste or gravy mix is silly.