I first heard about Shepherd.com in Jane Friedman’s newsletter, The Hot Sheet. It’s a book discovery site founded a little over a year ago by Ben Fox who is an avid reader. He was dissatisfied with online book discovery so decided to create a site that he thought was a better way to find new books.
Not long after reading this article, I received an email from someone at Shepherd mentioning my book, Designed For Haunting, and asking if I’d like to put together a recommendation list for the site. This was all free.
I am relatively cautious when it comes to people contacting me about doing things so I checked out the site and reread the Hot Sheet article. It seemed like a lot of fun so I agreed. Since Designed For Haunting is set around Halloween and I love traditional and cozy mysteries set around that time, I named my list “The best Halloween mysteries to escape into.”
It only took a few minutes for me to come up with the 5 books for the list: The Skeleton Haunts a House by Leigh Perry, The Spook in the Stacks by Eva Gates, The Legend of Sleepy Harlow by Kylie Logan, Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie and The Spirit in Question by Cynthia Kuhn.
It took a bit longer for me to do short reviews of the books. I actually reread all of them so I could more easily remember why I love these books so much.
I used the words “escape into” for the list because that’s how I feel about reading cozies and traditional mysteries. They are my escape from the problems of the real world. I love diving into other authors’ worlds and revisiting characters I’ve read about before.
Here’s the list as it appears on the site: https://shepherd.com/best-books/halloween-mysteries-to-escape-into
The site is a fun site to look around and see what other authors have recommended. You can also browse books by Wikipedia topic. I enjoy nonfiction and fiction books set in the Middle Ages so I searched for that and came up with a list “The best books on the Middle Ages”. I see a bunch of books on it that I want to read: Viking Age Iceland by Jesse L. Byock, Making a Living in the Middle Ages by Christopher Dyer, Growing Up in Medieval London by Barbara A. Hanawalt...
It was a fun experience, the people at Shepherd are good to work with and it’s a way for readers to become aware of me and my books and for me to spread a little love for books I’ve enjoyed reading. It’s a young site. It’ll be interesting to see how it grows in the coming years.