Book DNA – is it for you?

This is my penultimate SleuthSayers post, and I hope you'll find it helpful if you have a book to promote - or if you just like to read and discuss books!

When I was seeking publicity opportunities for It's Not Even Past a year ago, Liz Zelvin steered me toward Shepherd, a "book discovery platform" similar in some ways  - but not all - to

Goodreads. In 2026, Shepherd rebranded as Book DNA, which is certainly a more informative name for a book-finding service! They've got an interesting concept. Book DNA allows readers to find curated reading lists (if you like books by Jane Doe, here's what other Jane Doe fans recommend). It categorizes books by genre, and provides "author profile pages" that let you meet an author, learn about his or her book, and explore a list of five books that author recommends.

Well, why not? At the basic level, it's free to both readers and authors, so I hit "contact" and a pleasant, enthusiastic person named Cathy got back to me quickly, inviting me to fill out a form describing my book and listing five of my own faves. I was only sixty-five percent certain she was a real person and not an AI assistant, but - she turned out to be for real.

Listing my top five books was a tough assignment, because my purpose was to steer traffic toward my book, which is gritty crime fiction, perhaps could be called noir, and is technically a story collection, though the stories are interlocked, chronological, and  - read together -  form a novel. But many of my favorite writers are entirely outside those genres:  Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad), Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kittredge), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo), Jim Fergus (One Thousand White Women), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex). And don't get me started on kids' books. I read the entire Little House, All of a Kind Family, and Miss Bianca series straight through every few years. I still dream about Lois Lenski's Indian Captive and Ruth Archer's A Candle in Her Room. So I narrowed my focus to the best books that had something in common with my own - a dark premise, one or more murders, an element of mystery - and I still had a very, very hard time narrowing the list.

I knew Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell would make the cut. I wasn't sure which book in either case, but I finally decided by thinking, well, you love all their books, but which do you remember best?  And that gave me What Came Before He Shot Her - George's tour de force follow-up to her own With No One as Witness, in which Inspector Thomas Lynley's fiancee, Lady Helen Clyde, is murdered by a child of twelve. What Came Before He Shot Her is heartbreaking, moving, terrifying - as good as any of George's novels, but in some regards, entirely different. For Rendell, I was tempted by The Veiled One - I love Inspector Wexford - but I finally decided on a Barbara Vine title, A Dark-Adapted Eye, a masterwork of secrets and family dysfunction. (Vine is one of Rendell's pseudonyms.)

I had the same problem with Kate Atkinson, and I sort of thought I should list her twice - once for Jackson Brodie (I chose Case Histories, almost solely because it's first, but they're all great) and again for her more literary (and weird, and wonderful) Life After Life. I finally went with Jackson because it's closer to what I write - he's a semi-amateur sleuth with a predilection for trouble - and also because how do you choose Life After Life without its equally stunning companion novel, A God in Ruins? Haven't read those? Get thee to Bookshop.org. You are in for a life-changing read. I promise. 

Well, speaking of life-changing, I've listed three books and haven't gotten to Sarah Waters yet, although she's probably the best contemporary writer going. Fingersmith, remember? But I went with The Paying Guests. Oh. My. God. Just read it, if you haven't yet. It's got everything: Depression-era London, class warfare, forbidden lesbian sex, murder…

I sat up late arguing with Emma Donaghue (Room, Frog Music) and Paulette Jiles (have mercy! she has written some amazing books: Enemy Women, News of the World). Finally, I realized I cared a lot more about my list than either of them do (also, they weren't actually there) and I went with Jiles' phenomenal The Color of Lightning. It was tough because I dream about News of the World, but Lightning taught me so much about the American West and about fine, fine writing. It's the fictionalized story of Britt Johnson, a free Black cowboy who rescues his family from Comanchees during the Civil War.

When I'd turned in my list, along with a blurb about my own book, I heard back from Cathy and crew almost immediately. They'd made some small cuts for space and some edits to break up lengthy blocks of text. I didn't really notice anything missing, but I certainly appreciated being asked. 

The next step takes us to my only quibble with Book DNA - the buy button. Although readers can buy from Bookshop.org, Amazon is the default. One must click on a very small arrow on the Amazon button to see that there's an option.

I clicked through on both sales platforms to check my book, and found that there was no "preview" or "look inside" option on Amazon - something that many readers use prior to making a purchase. It turns out that Amazon doesn't post previews until a book is actually released. And once again, Book DNA came through with flying colors, offering to hold off posting until the release date - October 20.  

As Dad often reminded us, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." But no one at Book DNA had asked me for a dime. So - how do they make money? In two ways, as it turns out. One, Book DNA receives a commission on sales that accounts for about twenty percent of their revenue. The other eighty percent comes from reader and author memberships. But the "freemium" model means that the basic membership level is free for both writers and readers. Authors can - and many do - pay a bit more to get special promotion and increased visibility, but the curated lists are free for real.

There are plenty of happy writers engaging with the site, but it's always informative to know what folks don't like. So I asked Uncle Google what dissatisfied authors had to say about the platform, and the answer was revealing: authors didn't like the effort required to choose five favorite books and write a paragraph about each. These are writers.  Writers trying to promote a book. A book they have written. Go figure.  Ben Fox, co-founder of Book DNA, says that it should take authors thirty to 45 minutes to write something that will "deliver a lifetime of steady promotion. This isn't a blog where it posts and then readers never see it again; your recommendations plug into our entire platform, and every reader who visits looking for a book has a chance of bumping into your book and your book recommendations as they explore."

If you read my last SleuthSayers post, you know that I'm willing to work hard to take advantage of small promotion and publicity opportunities, and that some of these "little ponds" have really paid off for me. So I've little time for writers who claim to want to sell books but are not willing to make the effort to do so. 

I'm excited about the Book DNA opportunity, and I'm interested to see what happens on October 20th. Stay tuned.

Anna Scotti's work appears frequently in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. It's Not Even Past will be released by Crippen & Landru on October 20, followed by They Look Like Angels, a collection of stand-alone stories, early next year.  Scotti is the Chautauqua Journal's nominee for Best of the Net (fiction) this year for her story, The Intruder.

Scotti is also a poet, with recent inclusions in Chautauqua, Nimrod, The Women Artists Datebook, and in Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press).  You can read and hear some of her poems without a paywall on her site or at The New Yorker.