We launched on April 19th, 2021, and we are bootstrapped. We started by building a website that turns book discovery into something serendipitous. Now, we're building the other half: a private, personal way to track your reading and get personalized recommendations based on your tastes. You can find out what we are building next on our roadmap. 

If you want to support us and keep us independent, please join as a member for $50 a year (100% of what we raise goes toward new features)!

Traffic stats

For 2025, we had over 2.2 million visitors!

For 2026:

• January: 154,000 visits
• February: 121,000 visits (migration from Shepherd.com to BookDNA.com will lower traffic for 6 months while Google, Bing, and other search engines adjust).
• March: 71,600 visits (see above migration note)
• April: 70,500 visits (see above migration note)
   

For 2025:

• 2.2+ million visitors globally (all English-speaking)
• 1.3+ million visitors from the USA

Why the decline in 2025?

Google is having massive issues with its search engine (see the section below under 2024 to understand the scope of the problem). 

For 2024:

• 3.2+ million visitors globally (all English-speaking)
• 1.6+ million visitors from the USA

Why the decline in 2024?

Google is struggling with the quality of its search engine, and 2024 was rough, as we lost a lot of the traffic it normally sends us. They are no longer showing independent publishers and have shifted significantly toward large brands like Forbes. If you are curious about the situation, here is a breakdown of what other indie publishers are seeing (HouseFresh, RetroDodo, Healthy Framework (part 2), RePlay, etc.). This is painful in the short term, but I am hopeful that we will see more traffic over the coming years as they fix their search engine. We also have significant non-Google traffic, which is growing. I wrote up my thoughts to share with Google if you are curious. 

For 2023:

• 5 million visitors globally (all English-speaking)
• 2.5 million visitors from the USA

For 2022:

• 1.8 million visitors globally (all English-speaking)
• 900,000 visitors from the USA

For 2021 (launched in April):

• 266,000 visitors globally (all English-speaking)
• 137,000 visitors from the USA

How many clicks to bookstores?

This is the primary metric I use to judge our success.

Did we get a reader interested enough to click through to the bookstore?

My goal is to engage readers and interest them enough in a book that they go to the bookstore to buy it or preview it. I do not have sales stats, and you can read why here. 

For 2026:

• January: 10,700+ clicks to all books; of those, 2,200+ are to a promoted book.
• February: 7,100+ clicks to all books; of those, 2,100+ are to a promoted book. The migration from Shepherd.com to BookDNA.com will lower traffic for 6 months while Google, Bing, and other search engines adjust.
• March: 3,900+ clicks to all books; of those, 630+ are to a promoted book. 
• April: 3,100+ clicks to all books; of those, 500+ are to a promoted book.

For 2025:

• Clicks to all books: 145,400+
• Clicks to promoted books: 23,300+

For 2024:

• Clicks to all books: 233,700+
• Clicks to promoted books: 41,800+

How do I track this stat?

I use Plausible.io for analytics and to track bookstore clicks. There are always caveats when tracking what people do on a website, as much data is difficult to capture. Amazon's internal system shows I sent ~50,000 clicks to them in February (almost 2x higher), so it is hard to know who is right. For my sanity, I use Plausible since that is what I use for sitewide metrics. 

Can you give the author's stats for their books/pages?

I would love to! 

This would be an incredibly hard and expensive feature to build. I don't have the money yet, but once we have 1,500 author members, I can build it (I have a full breakdown of the challenges here).

How many readers visited my book list?

I've got a breakdown here for an example month showing what that looks like. 

Who are Shepherd's visitors?

We are global and aimed at English-speaking readers. 

All our book links are smart and location-based.

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)

According to Google Analytics, what are our readers' 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@bookdna.com if you have any questions; I'm an open book and always trying to update this F.A.Q. with more info.