Yesterday I put up a post reminding people that if they want, they can pay for content here instead of just getting it for free. But that’s not actually what I want most. What I want most is more readers! Because I like it when people read my work. But I have no money or time for promoting myself so, if you think more people should be reading this blog, I need your help to make that happen. And like the paying for content post, I will be putting this up as a monthly reminder, just in case you forget or are a new reader.
Here are 5 simple things you can do to help more people find me:
- If you participate in any real life Indian/Indian film community (meet-up group, friendly movie night, a Hindi class, a dance class, just being alive and in India), please mention my blog.
- If you participate in any other online Indian film community, message boards, or other blogs, or podcasts, or youtube channels, please mention and link back to me in your comments. You know, as appropriate, if it is about a movie I have reviewed or anything like that. Heck, if it is appropriate in any online community, if an Indian star or movie comes up in a discussion of video games, and I have something about it in my archives, please link back to me in a comment. (in case you think this doesn’t make a difference, a-commentator-who-shall-remain-anonymous posted a Bahubali fanfic on another site and mentioned my blog as helping to inspire it, which gets me about 10 views a week)
- Re-blog me! Or re-tweet me or re-post me on Facebook. Or re-snapchat me or whatever else it is that the kids are into these days. One of my all time best view days where when someone posted a review to a Sridevi fan group on Facebook.
- Message anything you think is particularly good directly to the people involved. One of my wonderful commentators tweeted a review directly to a director, and I actually got to have a twitter conversation with him! Oh right, and he re-tweeted me, which was cool and got me a bunch of new readers.
- COMMENT!!! My view count goes up per post with every comment. You guys are so smart and wonderful, that I know a lot of readers check the comment feed and will go back to a post any time they see a new comment posted. And, by the way, if you want me to write more posts of a certain kind (Malayalam, Tamil, shot by shot film summaries, etc.), commenting on them is the best way to make that happen.
And one bonus not simple idea:
A couple of people have mentioned casually that they have shared my work with professional film people they know. Film reviewers, film students, website editors, whatever. That’s great and I love that. When you share it, please also remind them that they can contact me if they would like to use anything I have written, or even something as little as an original thought I have had, in their own work.
And on the flip side, please please let me know if you see anyone who has cut and pasted anything I wrote, or even quoted an original thought I have had (something you read and think “this feels like deja vu, didn’t I read this analysis on dontcallitbollywood already?”), without citing where it came from. I love it when people quote me and cite me, and it makes me feel like the world is horrible when they don’t cite me and take my ideas for themselves. I’ve already been plagiarized a few times by people who thought it was no big deal to just copy an entire post and put it up as their own, or who took an argument I made and used it as their own without thinking about it. And that’s kind of the only thing I have of value to offer readers, a promise that every single thought, down to a tossed off comment about how Shahrukh’s hair looks, came from my own brain, not anywhere else. So if you see it being stolen, please let me know, sometimes there will be someone I can report it to and get it pulled down, or I can just ask nicely if they would please make it go away, or at least cite me as the source.
dontcallitbollywood 