I know, it’s hard to believe right? A free and EFFECTIVE editing service! Fret no longer over looking at the fees for professional editors. Thousands of dollars to edit your novel? Trust me, I know.
If you’ve written the next great novel, epic, poem, short story, it doesn’t matter, this place will have you covered. However, there is a give and take.
The website is http://www.critiquecircle.com and let me break down how the site works.
You critique other people’s stories, usually no more than 1500 word submissions at a time. The site runs off of a point program.
You critique a submission and you’re critique is over 300 words (not a hard feat to accomplish) and you get 1 point. It costs 3 points to submit a piece. It’s not the easiest work but it IS effective.
I’ve submitted 2 different pieces, one was a section in the middle of a novel I was working on and another was the first two chapters of the same novel. I’ve gotten a total of 7 or so critiques and found 1 to be relatively irrelevant and poorly written. The rest of the critiques were very well thought out and helpful points that began to polish my writing to what it needs to be. The community on this site is very helpful and as for me – are better writers than I haha.
It does take up time, but in the meantime, the point system keeps people critiquing so that no work goes untouched. So check out the site and get in on the action.
For a little more info, here is an excerpt taken out of their FAQ page –
 How does it all work…give me the basics |
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| Members submit their stories to the story queue, and pay credits to do so. Only a certain number of stories will be displayed each week (more information on this can be found here), so you may have to wait a week or two for yours to come up, depending on how much queue activity there is. When a story comes up for critique, other members can read it and submit their critiques to the author, thus earning credits.
Stories stay in the queue for a week, which runs Wednesday to Wednesday.
To help with queue wait times, we created a custom Newbie Queue. Your first story must be submitted here and, if you wish, you can submit up to three in total before moving to the other queues. When you join the site, you get two free credits, and you can use these towards the cost of posting your first story. While your membership is still new you are also allowed the opportunity to upgrade to a Premium membership (details in the FAQ entry linked here) for an additional credit, which will allow you to submit your first chapter to the queues immediately.
Stories in the Newbie Queue can receive up to six full critiques, while stories in the other queues can receive an unlimited number of critiques.
Once your story in the newbie queue has received 6 crits of more than 150 words each it will be put into older submissions.
When posting a story, authors have some choice in who can view their story. For example, some authors will specify that only people who have been members of this site for a month can read their story. That’s why you may not be able to view all the stories in the queue.
So, those are the basics on how the system works…for more details, please continue reading the FAQs about Story Queue, Giving Critiques, Receiving Critiques, and Submitting a Story. |
ZinnWrites 