Last year, My friend Dr.Shimona Bhattacharya and I started Science & Discovery blog and we were extremely enthusiastic about what we were doing. There was very less of what could stop us from going to the top. We started as a science blog, and it was all gold and glitters we could see. Nothing seemed hard. I would write an article, she would write an article, and the few friends, we had in the team would write some more. We’d have had around 4-5 articles a week and the blog would run wonderfully. We were looking to reach as many people as possible. Over the time, with all the Marketing gimmicks that worked on Social Media, the best one was ‘Free Giveaways’. One random evening, Dr.shimona called up and said, “Let’s give away free ebooks, I’ve got some great ones in my collection”. Initially, I was reluctant,for it,Didn’t seem like a great idea, but went with it anyways. We got together on a Skype call and decided on the titles we were going to give.We went with it, we announced it on our Facebook Page. The deal was, “Like our page, and post on our wall in simple line saying, ‘I need the ebook’”. It was something anyone would have done to get a free copy of a Magazine or book. And guess what? Overnight, we got hundreds of likes and posts on our wall. And it kept pouring in the following days. Finally, we shared the book on Google Drive and shared it on Facebook so that our fans could download it. Nothing was wrong until a few hours after posting it. Then the comments of protest against Copyright violation started pouring in. Oh,Trust me we hadn’t seen that coming. People started commenting things.We immediately deleted the link.But people wouldn’t appreciate anyways. They continued criticizing. Apart from those who were furious about sharing the book, there were people unhappy about us taking the link down.We apologized for sharing the book online and then apologized again to those whom we couldn’t give the book to. We actually trended No.1 on Reddit for a whole night under Science Topics for this .At this time,I was just scrolling down our Facebook Page reading comments from people.One particular comment struck me hard, (It got me furious. We never had intended on Copyright Violation. We were just two teenagers trying to give away ebooks so we could increase our reach on Facebook). It read something like, “There are hundreds of people who make a living out of this, you cannot take it away. If you really want to share knowledge, why don’t you write your own book and then give it away for free? ”Well, writing a book was far from our reach at that point.But then, I something flashed to me.Me and Dr.Shimona had already worked on a magazine called ‘vision’. The creation ofthe magazine was what had brought me close to Dr.Shimona. It was her idea, to publish a magazine that was free, to share ideas from people and publish articles that everyone could read for free. Well, until then I never knew I wanted to work on something like that, but when I got introduced to My friend Dr.Shimona. Bhattacharya in early 2012, I just got along with her on making the magazine for my Science & fiction Blog.We had published it and it hadn’t really reached many people. Only a few hundred of them had actually downloaded and fewer had actually read it. Now, seemed like a good idea to release it again. People were challenging us to write a book and publish it for free, we couldn’t do that. I said, “We have everything ready, Let’s just republish the magazine with a Ravishing Name and design". We announced the same night that we were going to publish a magazine in the next few weeks and that it’d be free for everyone. Suddenly,all the furious comments turned into applause. People started congratulating us & appreciating for taking a bold decision to publish a magazine for free. More ‘likes’ poured in over the next few weeks while we were working on redesigning magazine.To add icing on the cake, we requested physicist, Professor Akash.Mitra to write feature stories for the magazine and he agreed. All this took place on the day when we released the Science magazine. We named it EMERGE which was an acronym for Energy Mercy Efficiency Royalty Guild and Enthusiasm ... We had left no stone unturned in spreading out a word that we were publishing a science magazine. Our fans had grown from 2.5k to 15k before the night of release, without even spending a penny on marketing. Well, the whole thing did not work out as planned, but we ended up getting loads of love from people
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