You should submit this! I think it’s a great idea.

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.

Thanks!! I was going to submit it Monday morning :)

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 :)

How is DBpedia for books? Could it play a role in bootstrapping your database?

Very cool, I just talked with a NLP expert and they had recommended it as well. I honestly haven't dug into that aspect yet as I've just been grinding away to get the basics going. This might help a lot!

I think the "Topics" list really needs some curation [1] and some more layers of taxonomy. Right now the "topic" breakdown seems 100% isomorphic to the "recommender" breakdown - the links literally go to the exact same URLs - which isn't sustainable. Bookshops don't have separate shelves for each member of staff.

[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?

Totally, this is launching on Monday into beta and there is a lot of work to do here.

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

I dunno. It's all well and good having multiple "angles" on a given topic, but if a new user has no meaningful way of distinguishing between those angles then it's just going to be confusing and noisy for them.

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'd love to hear your thoughts if you have a few minutes, my email is [email protected]. Can you tell me what you would do and how you would approach it? I'd love to chat if you have a few minutes :)

This is cool. Thank you for sharing!

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!

Thanks :)

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!

I love the curation of topics - it's exactly the way people would think about discovering niche books.

Curious to know - how did you curate these?

Totally by hand over the last 3 months, I have quite a lot of automation in place to help me do it, but at the end of the day I work with each author to craft 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.

How do you get in touch with authors? What's their motivation to contribute a list? Getting more exposure?

Just the grind of cold emails :)

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.

Good approach! I also tried at some point a project to enable authors to self-publish, but couldn't solve their problem of getting readers. Wishing you success!

Thanks, ya the next phase is going to be fun as I start building up the traffic/audience.

Avid reader here, just signed up. There's always room for new methods for discovering reading material.

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.

Thanks!

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.

[email protected], hit me up as I could use feedback :), Thanks, Ben

Open Library recently(ish) launched a bookshelf style browsing feature to mimic the organic discovery of titles based on your interests and, even though it’s frowned upon by some, the cover. It’s awesome. I’ve read so many books that I’ve scrolled past a thousand times on iTunes and Audible. It does help that I can flip through the books a bit before deciding to read it. Like you can at the store or the library.

How did you get such a good domain name? Did you purchase it for a premium price?

Thanks! I am a long time domain buyer and I had the opportunity to buy it a few years ago. I knew it would make a great brand one day.

I bought it for mid 5 figures, so pretty good deal.

What are you plans for helping authors establish a relationship with their readers?

Gosh so much as that is half the goal of this site!

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 :)

Sounds very interesting. Thanks for the detailed reply. I wrote a book about 4 years ago. It was very well received by those that read it and still gets a 5-star rating to this day but marketing it was real hard and getting the kind of distribution I would have wanted has been really hard.

Ya and that is the crux of what I am hoping to try to solve.

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.

Totally agree. Traction is even harder than 10yrs ago. I hope you're able to crack it.

Me too, it is a nice problem to work on and I am hopeful that in a few years I can make a dent.

This is cool. Is there an ML component, or is everything hand curated?

100% hand curated for now, my hope is to get into NLP early next year to do some cool stuff :).