Posting & Reviewing for Newbies

by Jim Wile

Background
Tips on posting and reviewing

This is a chapter in the group book called Advice to New FanStorians. It contains a few tips concerning both posting and reviewing.

Posting

1. When preparing your post, try to use a font that is appropriate to the type of post and sized large enough for your readers to read comfortably. For example, if posting a letter that you want to look handwritten, there are several handwriting fonts. If you write a humorous piece, a font like Comic Sans MS works well. Serif fonts are good for prose such as short stories, essays, and novels. Font style is a matter of personal preference and is not as important as font size, though. I don’t use anything less than size 16 and usually use 18 or 20. This post uses Book Antiqua font, size 20.

2. When you copy and paste from a Word document into the Advanced Editor, it will leave the text double-spaced, even though it was single-spaced in Word. Perhaps this will be fixed someday, but if you prefer your post to look single-spaced, like this one, then copy and paste it by doing Ctrl+shift+V instead of just Ctrl+V as in a normal paste. This will remove all formatting, including bold, italics, even blank lines between paragraphs, so it will be necessary to put them back once you are in the Advanced Editor. This is a pain, but worth it if you prefer the single-space appearance. If you would prefer to use buttons for pasting rather than doing Ctrl+V or Ctrl+shift+V, there are buttons for this on the toolbar of the Advanced Editor; however, they don't do anything except give you an instruction to do a Ctrl+V or Ctrl+shift+V, so you can skip the button and just do it yourself.

3. Don’t use a “text background color” (as opposed to a “text color”) on double-spaced text. It doesn’t look so good to my eye. You seldom see that anywhere in real life. This is how it looks using a white text background with the double-spaced appearance, which I got because I copied it directly from Word.

This is how it looks with a single-spaced appearance, which I got by following the instructions in tip 2 and using a yellow text background. You can use this to your advantage if you want to highlight the text.

For poetry, feel free to use any background color for the page and any text color, but leave text background color alone.

4. Proofread your work carefully while preparing your post, and make sure to click the View button after editing it to see how it will look to your readers. It’s amazing how many small things you catch by viewing it before posting.

When copying and pasting from Word, you’ll sometimes get a few improperly translated characters. It doesn’t treat single quotes, double quotes, or em dashes well, and you’ll see some funny symbols like â?? instead. This mainly happens now in the Author Notes area, not so much anymore in the body of the posting.

5. The best way to have your work read is to develop a fan base because your fans will be notified each time you post something. You will only be able to develop a fan base by promoting your work so that enough people will read it for the member dollars. Also, it must be quality work in order for people to keep wanting to read it. Be patient, though. It takes time to develop a good fan base.

Having your work appear on the homepage requires either that you’ve promoted it into the Featured lists (top 12 in member dollar value) or it’s been reviewed enough times so that it appears in the Well-Received lists. This is the best way to get reviews and develop fans.

If posting a novel, promote at least the first two chapters high enough to be in the Featured Stories list. After the first two, and you have hooked a number of readers, you can consider promoting subsequent chapters less.

Reviewing

6. When reviewing, try to be thoughtful and helpful. If you see something wrong or that could be better, comment on why. If appropriate, show an example of how to correct the problem. Rather than merely saying, “Your description of the barn was uninspired,” instead say something like,

“If you had given us the reasons for the creepiness of the barn by emphasizing its decrepit state, presence of cobwebs, and peeling paint, rather than simply stating it was creepy-looking, we would have had a better idea of why the kids refused to go in there.”

If commenting on, say, the meter of a poem, don’t just say the meter was inconsistent. Instead, show some examples of where it is off. I even like to suggest an improvement by rewriting the offending line in proper meter. This is much more informative and helpful, though it does take more time and thought on your part. The very best reviews are the ones that point out specific flaws and suggest alternatives.

7. When reviewing, if there is nothing to criticize about a piece, then compliment it, but make the comments thoughtful by saying why you liked something, not just that you liked it. For example:

“I loved your portrayal of Celeste. You gave us such a beautiful description of not only her appearance (‘She was like a little gamine—lean and wiry with a pixie face. Bright, long red hair, a scattering of freckles across her little nose and cheeks…’) but of her motherliness, as seen by her loving relationship with Ruben.”

The part in parentheses I quoted directly from the piece to be more specific. This helps the author know exactly what you thought was good about the piece and why, and it shows that you read it closely and thought about it.

A review such as the following shows only that the reviewer was just trying to write enough to satisfy the 150-character lower limit and is not helpful at all:

“I really liked the characters, and it was very well-written. You are a great story teller. Good luck in the contest, and I hope you have a great day. Blessings, Jim.”

This review says almost nothing and shows the reviewer only did the review for the member dollars. Note: It’s fine to wish people luck and send blessings, just not to use them to fulfill the minimum requirement of characters.

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