Today is a momentous day for me and for mahabore, the blog. After around three odd years of focused efforts, hard work, smart work, grabbing all the opportunities that came my way and some sacrifices in terms of time spent doing other things that I really like, I have finally managed to break into the higher echelons of book reviewing in India.
What began as a simple and easy mode of getting free books by Indian authors to read and enjoy slowly became something of an obsession with me in the second half of 2014. By then I had read and reviewed at least around 40+ books on the blog and gradually was developing a style and niche of my own. However, little did I know that it would soon take the form of a severe obsession bordering on an OCD kind of situation where I would feel awkward and downright miserable if I wasn’t in the middle of a book at any given point in time.
And this ‘hurry’ to read and review books (for lack of a better term) proved to be a win-win for both the publishers and for me as well. Given the plethora of decent books by Indian authors being published, and the fact that publishers, publicists and authors had to rely on all means to ensure that their books stood out in a crowd, for whatever reason blogger reviews, and that too the competent and unbiased ones slowly became the media of choice for publishers. Readers knew that by and large book bloggers’ loyalties could not be bought by publishers or authors and that most book reviews on blogs were honest and unbiased. And this meant that book bloggers who developed a style and niche of their own were valued for their reviews and their points of view on the latest books. And this is where I managed to get noticed.
While 2014 and 2015 were all about crime thrillers, historical fiction and mythological books, I have now gradually developed a taste for non-fiction books as well. And by now, most publishers and authors have reached a stage where they can expect nothing but a brutally honest opinion in terms of a review from me.
The Core Team of Project 365 (a collaborative blog in 2014) comprising of Sakshi (www.sakshinanda.com) have moved on to running a firm which provides end to end editorial services to authors, Rekha (www.rekhadhyani.com) and Sid (www.iwrotethose.com) have published a book each (both of which are still selling well out there) and are well on their way in the final stages of their second novels today. And given that I am a book reviewer, I guess all of us have kind of continued to nurture and work on our love for the written word which we all had in 2014. Here’s wishing for many more wonderful years of the four of us continuing to love words as much as we do today.
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This post was written for Project 365 : A post a day where the intention is to publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided. Today’s prompt was Our blogs morph over time, as interests shift and life happens. Write a post for your blog — but three years in the future, and this post contains not only my ambitious plans for the next three years, but also the plans (at least I think so) of the entire Core Team of Project 365.
