We launched on April 19th, 2021, and are still very new. You can find out what we are building next on our feature roadmap. 

Traffic stats

Over the last 12 months, we've had 4.4 million visitors!

For August 2023: 

• We had 421,000+ visitors and 552,000+ pageviews.
  • Traffic is up 175% over the previous year. 
  • Growth was flat month over month. We are at a bit of a plateau, and this is a normal part of the process as we start to rank for more and more search terms. It can take ~3 years to rank for competitive Google searches, and we are doing well so far.
• In 2022 we had 1.8 million visitors, and we've already surpassed that in 2023 with 3.3 million visitors as of August 2023. 

Bookstore clicks and sales stats

I wish I had better data here, and I'll share what we have.

We are a book discovery website, so we don't sell books directly. We refer readers to Bookshop.org and Amazon (and eventually, I'd like to add more partners). 

Why don't we have great sales data?

• Amazon only gives us credit for a sale if someone buys a book within 24 hours. We send a lot more sales to Amazon than are represented in the data they give us. 
• In general, affiliate tracking is a mess, and there are plenty of cases where we won't get credit for a sale. Not only does this hurt us financially, it also means we get no stats for that sale. 
• Some of our readers copy the book's title they find on our website and paste that into a website. This means we don't get credit for that sale or data about it. Any book sale is a good thing, but I want to be clear about the limitations of our data.  

So with those caveats in mind, here are some rough sales stats. 

For August 2023, we sold ~$60,000 worth of books we can track (so on an annual basis, ~$800,000 of book sales with the holiday spike). 

My estimate from talking to people in the industry is that we are probably selling ~$100,000 worth of books for book partners each month. 

Keep in mind our share of book sales from partners is ~4%, and this funds about 40% of our costs (see our business model here and join as a Founding Member to help us stay independent and innovating). 

For August 2023, we sent ~40,000 clicks to bookstore partners. 

This is a much better stats to judge our impact IMO. As we help a lot of readers discover books and authors they didn't know about. 

I am working to get better stats in place around bookstore clicks. We recently switched to Plausible and implemented better outbound tracking. I will be able to share more detailed stats in September, as it will be the first month we have those. For now, it is an estimate based on a mix of UA/Amazon data.

Who are our visitors?

We are global and aimed at English-speaking readers. 

All our book links are smart and based on a person's location.

So if someone is in the U.S.A., we load bookstores in the U.S.A., in the U.K., we load U.K. bookstores, and so on (for every country worldwide). 

Traffic is spread out, and here is a sketch: 

• 51% U.S.A.
• 11% U.K.
• 6% Canada
• 4% India
• 4% Australia
• 22% from the rest of the world (all English speakers)

Per Google Analytics, what are our reader demographics?

Gender:

• 50% female
• 50% male

Age (Google doesn't collect data for those under 18): 

• Under 18 - Google doesn't collect data for those under 18
• 18-24 - 25%
• 25-34 - 24%
• 35-44 - 20%
• 45-54 - 14%
• 55-64 - 10%
• 65+ - 7%

Feel free to email ben@shepherd.com if you have any questions; I'm an open book and always trying to update this F.A.Q. with more info. 

What about a dashboard for authors with their traffic stats?

I would love to create a dashboard for authors, and here is more info on that feature.