What is your business model?

(Be sure to read about my goals for authors and readers.)

I will never charge authors to create a book recommendation list. 

I will never charge readers to read book recommendation lists. 

Are you making Scrooge McDuck money? 

Nobody goes into the book business to make Scrooge McDuck money 😁.

I love reading, and I am passionate about this business.

Every business needs to make money to build great things and be sustainable. My financial goal is to reach $240,000 in revenue annually, which would cover our servers, software, and small team (I work for free for now).

Critically, it would allow us to hire one to two full-time developers in addition to our current part-time developer (everything you see was built with one part-time developer). 

How much do you pay yourself?

Nothing. I've been working full-time at Shepherd since December 2020 and am passionate about what we are building. At some point, I will need a small salary to help pay some of my living costs. 

Who is funding Shepherd? 

I am funding Shepherd from my savings (more about me and why I am building Shepherd). We are bootstrapped and meet our small team. I started working on Shepherd in December 2020 and launched the website in April 2021 (here is a timeline of our progress and features). 

How will Shepherd reach financial sustainability? 

Shepherd is primarily funded by memberships from authors and readers. That is 100% of my focus, given what I have learned over the last three years as I've tested different business models.

We also have financial support from affiliate book sales, display ads, and fun reader/book swag I am launching soon. I've tested many business models, and here is a longer breakdown of why it is impossible to earn enough from affiliate book sales to fund the website.

How do the membership programs work?

Our Founding Author Membership Program

This is an annual membership of $50 dollars, and 100% of what we raise goes toward building new features (and improving existing ones). I am so thankful to all the authors who have become Founding Members and joined our quest to build a unique indie book platform designed for readers and authors. Without their support, we wouldn’t be here.

What do authors get in return? There are some great perks, and I am working on a lot more. 

My long-term goal is to hire a full-time developer. Currently, we work with a fantastic developer named Marton. He works on a part-time basis. My goal is to hire a full-time developer in addition to Marton. This would allow us to speed up the development of new features. Imagine what we can do with 1.5 developers, given what we have accomplished with 0.5 :).

Our Founding Reader Membership launched in October 2024. 

I have a few readers who have already signed up, and I am working to launch our reader memberships as we release a full reader app. We will have a pro membership for that app with extra functionality and hopefully entice a lot of readers to support us. 

What else funds Shepherd?

Affiliate Advertising

Bookstore partners like Bookshop.org and Amazon give us a small percentage of any book sold (this comes from them and not from authors/publishers). As our traffic grows, this helps to offset our costs.

One of the big reasons there are no better book websites online is that it is tough to make enough money from book affiliate sales. This is because of the low cost of books, the low affiliate payouts by Amazon, and the nature of how affiliate systems work (as they scrub a lot of sales you send).

As I have tested and gathered data over the last 18 months, I have realized that it is practically impossible to earn enough to fund our operations through affiliate sales with Amazon or Bookshop.org. Basically, for every $1,000,000 in book sales we create, they only pay us ~$20,000. This makes it virtually impossible to fund the project fully through affiliate sales.

You can read a longer post on this subject here. 

Display Advertising

I hate display ads, but I added them in August 2022 to cover more of our costs. I finally removed them in 2024 and replaced them with book ads from our author base. 

What are your costs?

My goal with this project is to make it financially sustainable by the end of 2024 to fulfill its mission of helping readers find books in fun and unique ways while helping authors meet readers. To do that, we need to reach gross revenues of $240,000 a year.

What will you do once you hit profitability? 

Keep investing in the website and growing our development team. Imagine what we can do with 1.5 developers, given what we have accomplished with 0.5 :).

Feel free to drop me an email or comment if you have questions.