I’m honoured to be among the first authors to help American entrepreneur Ben Fox add flesh to the skeleton of a brilliant idea at https://shepherd.com/.
A book-lover and tech expert, he wants readers to be able to access easily the tomes they enjoy reading. So Shepherd, the website, is sub-titled ‘Discover the best books’. Ben describes it as browsing in your favorite bookstore ‘reimagined for the online world’. Authors, experts and creators recommend books in many categories.
You search under headings such as ‘The best dog books’, ‘The best books about the Soviet Union’, ‘The best children’s books about chocolate’. There are hundreds of rubrics.
My contribution is, ‘The best novels to challenge hardcore readers’. I recommend The Rings of Saturn, Moby Dick, and Mrs Dalloway, among others, and I had the great privilege of introducing my recommendations with a blurb about my own debut novel, The Hands of Pianists (Fomite Press, 2021).
Shepherd.com is terrific fun, and I recommend that you give it a browse. In its infancy, it is bound to be steered towards providing bigger and better services for readers.