New Author

Welcome to the site, Ironwolf. I had a quick look at your chapter. Please have a look at an article I posted in the Premium forum with tips on how to maximize the number of reviews you can receive. It's pinned near the top of the forum, so you can't miss it. One key piece of advice from that post is to always include the Premium group when posting any stories to the site. Most of the best reviewers aren't members of many other groups, if any, so they won't even see your chapter being posted unless you include Premium. Although posting to Premium requires you to use points, that means your reviewers will receive points for reviewing your chapter. Your reviewers need points to post their own work to Premium.

If you really want to fast track getting reviews, start reviewing the works of others. Begin with the works you see scrolling down your home page. Those writers are guaranteed to be active on the site at present. We have a lot of members who are only here part-time or come and go as life dictates, so not all are active. Since you write sci-fi, join the Fantasy/Magic/Sci-Fi group, if you haven't already. If you look at the stories/chapters posted to that group, the most recently posted are likely to be from active authors too. Check the date of their posts.

I'm drowning in Canadian income taxes this weekend but will try to have a look at your story as soon as you post it to Premium. I don't need points (I have a huge stash), but unless you start reviewing and posting with points (in Premium), you'd be wasting your time here during your trial period. Points are fairly easy to accumulate, made even easier with a recent change to the points system. Generally, for every 1000 words you want to post, you need to review 3000 words (or 3 x 1000, if you prefer) to get enough points to post your work. To get the maximum benefit from this site long term, you'll need reciprocal relationships with other writers with whom you can trade reviews. In general, if you regularly trade reviews with three other writers, you'll probably earn enough points to keep posting. Most of us have at least five such relationships, so gathering points is easy.

The best writers, including some regularly published authors, tend to be the best reviewers too, but they usually stick to Premium. By reviewing their work (they need feedback too), you learn from them how they write, and when they reciprocate, you'll get the most experienced feedback available on this site. Try to use inline reviews instead of regular ones; they usually require a little more time to do, but are more useful to most writers than regular reviews. Giving and receiving reviews usually leads to those long-term relationships with other writers that you need to benefit from this site.

Feel free to post here with any questions you may have. You can also send me a connection request if you like, so we can use private messages. I do volunteer user support on the site to help get new members up to speed as quickly as possible, so I'm happy to answer whatever questions I can.

Have fun!
Dirk