For readers: A private, personal way to track your reading and get deeply personalized recommendations. Think Goodreads, rebuilt as a calm private space to track what they read, keep notes, and get truly personalized book recommendations, like Pandora or Spotify for books.

For authors: We help the right readers discover your book. Then, for readers who rate it highly, we identify them as fans and give you an easy way to let them know when your next book is out. Each book builds on the last, making every launch easier and helping word-of-mouth grow without adding more work on your side.

We’re in beta. This won’t be easy, but we’re building this alongside you. Thanks for sticking with us as we figure it out.

Plus, our progress this month and what I’m reading 📚.

Fun Size! 🦥

Book DNA (formerly Shepherd) launched in April 2020, and our focus has been purely on book discovery. We help readers discover books they don’t know about, and we help authors reach the most likely readers for their books.

Since then, a lot has changed, and it has become clear that we can’t achieve what we want to do for readers and authors as a website alone. We need to build a full app and go head-to-head with Goodreads. We are building a calm private space to track your reading and get deeply personalized recommendations.

How will this help authors?

Since the start, my goal has been to lead the most likely readers to discover your book in fun and unique ways. That isn’t changing. We will continue to create features to help the right readers find your books (as we have continued to do on the website). I’ll share more about how we'll do that in the app over the course of this year (and how we want to help you get more momentum).

What are we adding beyond discovery?

I’ve talked with over a thousand authors in the last few years, and I think the biggest impact we can make beyond discovery is helping them collect their fan base and launch their new book.

I have a short video I made about basic book marketing for authors who want to do only the minimum. One piece of advice in that video is to get your readers into your newsletter by including a plug at the end of your books. Why? Because email is the last place you really control, and your fans are the most likely readers to buy your next book and tell other readers about your book. But many authors struggle to implement this, and when I spoke with readers, they rarely sign up for even their favorite author’s newsletters.

I want to make it easy to collect your fans within the app. How?

When a reader logs a book in our app, we ask them if they want to be notified when a new book by that author is released, or when a new book in that series is released (if it is a series).

The important part being:

This is a simple way to start, but it has been hugely popular in testing so far!

This allows us to collect readers who loved your book enough that they want more from you. This is our first step toward collecting fans, and then we will build tools so that when new books come out, they will be notified. As we get going, I will be looking to build an author dashboard to give authors more control and more ways to interact with their fans. I’m also looking at how we can give authors a page they can send readers to, where they can sign up for these alerts with a few clicks.

It is early days, so please understand this won’t happen overnight, but I wanted to share where we are going and why 😀

First, we need to build our core features, build the features that will super excite readers, and then launch publicly (aiming for late this year). Then we need to start pulling in thousands and thousands of readers into the app as we grow. I am excited for the challenge! 😅

Reminder: We’re building a smarter, more personal way to manage your reading life, with recommendations based on your Book DNA. Think Goodreads, but rebuilt for readers who want a private space to track what they read, keep notes, and get truly personalized book recommendations, like Pandora or Spotify for books.

We now have 15 beta users tracking their 2026 reading data in the app.

Their feedback has been incredibly useful! I did 9× 1-hour Zoom sessions, and the rest of the beta users were thrown right in with no onboarding to get some raw feedback😀.

They have helped me identify blind spots in the UX and understand what excites them about the future features we are considering.

One of the big takeaways is that we needed to move what you are currently reading or listening to out of the reading log and onto its own page (and make it a bit more of a dashboard view).

We are going to add this to the app soon as part of those improvements:

We will be rolling out a number of improvements and fixes based on their feedback. After that, we will focus on Goodreads and StoryGraph imports, as they are a major barrier to adoption right now.

I am feeling more confident about this feature (so you never lose track of the next book in the series). I am doing some testing this week as this is another area we are pulling in alerts for readers (and authors).

And similar for tracking your favorite authors.

Fun stuff! I can’t wait to import my reading history in a few months.

This perk is for members; we couldn’t build this platform without you!

We now feature our members' new books on the new books, all-time, and trending bookshelf pages for 1 to 2 years (depending on their membership). We consider a new book to be any book published in the last 3 years.

We have over 3,500 bookshelves on things like science fiction, World War 1, or kids' books. And just email us if one is missing so we can add it 😀 .

Here is what the featured spot looks like (under “New books from our members”):

Learn more about this perk here 😀

Our app:

15 beta testers are actively using the app and giving us feedback.

Our focus right now is on making it incredibly easy to log and track reading (no bugs, no confusion). If we get this right, we can start pulling readers from Goodreads who want their reading log to be private and an easier-to-use app (and every reader we get out of Goodreads helps authors).

What’s next: Fix the core issues our beta testers have found, then bring in another batch of testers to ensure everything runs smoothly. Then start building the import process for Goodreads and StoryGraph (roadmap).

Our website:

71,000+ readers visited the site to discover a new book (dip due to domain move, but should improve in the coming months).

We tracked 3,900+ clicks to bookstores, including 630+ clicks to promoted books (the actual number is higher due to tracking limitations).

Last year, we had 2.2 million visitors (stats on our traffic, clicks, sales, and demographics here).

We did our family vacation early this year and spent 2 weeks in Crete, Greece. It was amazing, and I enjoyed the food, hiking, Greek people, and the beach.

I finished…

I am reading...

Thanks, Ben

P.S. Crete is beautiful 😀

Don’t forget…

Recently, I’ve talked with authors about the following…

This is one of many perks for members: membership costs only the price of one fancy coffee drink a year, and everything we raise goes toward our mission to help authors and readers (I work for free).

Once you sign up for a membership, you can schedule a time to meet 😀.