Bookgest – A Summary

WELCOME BACK TO ANOTHER BANGER GUYS!!! I am very excited about this one because it is the last post of my 5-day post challenge series meaning I AM FREE NOW!!!! With this post my short vacations are also over, meaning I am starting 12th grade on 1st March. I am officially a ‘senior’, a big boi. Not gonna lie, I still feel the same as yesterday minus the OVERWHELMING maturity that I got in a week’s time. While this is the last post of the streak, I am not going to write a review on this one. As of writing this introduction, I have no idea what this post is going to be about. I was thinking of reviewing the ‘Disciple of War’ book from the ‘Art of The Adept’ series but decided against it because I have already reviewed three of them and want you to do some work for a change.

Let’s clear this up first, a few of you reached out to me saying that the post before the last was on 25th Feb and the last post was on 27th Feb, so I failed the challenge, but guess what…I have evidence that I posted it at exactly 12 am because Bluehost’s servers didn’t process the photos in time, so blame Bluehost. Anywho, neither am I just nor is life fair, which is why I declare it still counts as 26th Feb, meaning you all are mad ’cause you are bad. Maybe not the best decision on my part to call my readers bad, but look how much I care.

Let’s talk about my journey for this blog, not because I don’t have any ideas for this post 😬, but because it’s been 3 years since I have been blogging. I wrote my first post sometime in the November of 2019 and posted it on a barely working website I made with a service called Blogger. I used all the HTML and CSS skills I learned in middle school to edit the theme and although it looked terrible, I was extremely proud of it. Then I took a break for 6 months (after just one post), proving that I have never changed, I still have just as terrible motivation. Some small things happened during these six months as my 8th standard ended, A DEADLY DISEASE emerged, and some lame people went under lockdown while I roam around maskless (this didn’t happen), and then I trolled some global leaders on Twitter (this also didn’t happen), told my brother I loved him for the first time in my life (this is clearly a lie).

Basically, I got a loooot of time in 2020, by the end of April 2020 I thought it would be a good idea to grow that old blog further, but this time I was serious about it, I shifted to a WordPress-Bluehost hosting, started posting regularly. And by regularly, I mean REGULARLY. 9 posts in 2 months…I think that’s still my personal best. Continued the year strong with a few more posts, and wrote a terrible book called “From Information to Knowledge” which I envisioned as an awesome study guide but was basically a written-down collection of information from lots of other books, videos and other resources. There was zero originality in that book. The grammar was terrible, the book was very boring and the ultimate reason I think it sucked is that I have no idea what a good student is like, because I certainly am not one, so me telling others how to become one was a pretty dumb idea. But on the bright side, it made a lot of people start taking my blog seriously because now I could put ‘author’ in the bio of all of my internet profiles.

A lot of my other posts in 2020 were articles instead of – posts that had anything to do with books, some of these articles were original ideas that popped into my head, like ‘The Art of Doing Nothing’ and ‘Online Learning’ while others, like ‘Imperfections’ and ‘Life Purpose’ were again just whatever I learnt from other people, be it authors or internet self-help gurus. I did come up with a very cool idea that I still enjoy working with, in 2020 though, it was the character review series. Basically, I just chose fictional characters and picked them apart from the author’s and reader’s points of view. This helped my blog gain a lot of traction during that time when it was relatively unknown because character reviews were a never-before-seen idea.

The first three quarters of 2021 was and still is the period where Bookgest grew the most, I did consistent monthly posts during this time, and as character reviews had taught me, new ideas and innovations were the fastest way to grow the blog, and that’s exactly what I did. I focussed much more on experimenting and innovating that year and it has been the most successful year I have had as a writer. 2021 was when I talked about different genres, techniques and ideas, and while I did a very small amount of book reviews that year, a lot of people liked where Bookgest was heading. The Debate series also started back then with the ‘Fiction VS Non-Fiction‘ post.

Then came 2022, a very dark time for this website. Just 4 posts in a whole year…I did, however, write my two favourite posts of the blog that year – ’18 lessons’ and ‘Originality’. Both of these were the most vulnerable I have ever been on the internet, talking about topics very tough for me to discuss and very close to my heart, a lot of people for some reason like this and these posts were the sole reason Bookgest didn’t end in 2022 and the majority of my readers didn’t leave. This was also the year where my motivation and consistency were down in the trenches, but 2022 did teach me a lot in terms of how the internet worked.

And now we are in 2023, it’s been just 2 months, I have given 2 exams and posted 5 times. Looks like 2023 is going to be an awesome time for us here at Bookgest. I have been unconsciously dedicating every year to a particular cause for the past 5 years. 2020 was ‘explore’, 2021 was ‘innovate’, 2022 was ‘relax’ and 2023 is going to be ‘improve’. At least I hope it’s going to be. I hate making promises, mainly because I find it very difficult to keep to them. This 5-day streak was a way to prove to myself that I can actually do things I set my mind to if I’m ready to get uncomfortable and keep at it even when I hate it. I want to push myself this year and see where I end up, I don’t mean I’m going to become a disciplined genius or something in a year, I probably will never be disciplined or organized and I don’t want to. I know my strengths and I don’t mind sticking to them. But I will try to not be the worst blogger on the internet.

This was it for the 5-day continuous post streak. Today is day 5. While I started writing all of these posts very ‘forcefully’ and felt like they would never work out, I still enjoyed what my mind came up with. And that has been me for the start of 2023, I hope to see much more of you guys this year, although this isn’t a promise 😄

See you soon…