There are some ups and downs with this site. Yes, you have to pay a fee, which is good in that it does help prevent just anyone from entering the site. You can pay a small trial membership fee or sign up for a whole year. One downside is that a few times my boyfriend's credit card (he got me the membership as a birthday gift) was charged twice in the same month, once even after we had notified our intention to cancel. This could have been an honest error, however.
You have to review the works of others in order to receive credit to post your own work. There are several regular and terrific reviewers whose advice I found helpful. But I also found the site a bit "cliquish" in that it seemed certain writers were merely patting one another's backs and that you pretty much have to be accepted into this clique to really get your work noticed at all. A downside is that once a writer gets a certain amount of "reputation" on the site, readers will automatically click on selections posted by that writer to review them, thus elevating that piece to the top of the popularity polls when, in fact, many more deserving pieces may go unread or with little attention. The review system in itself can get to seem a bit cliquish, with writers simply granting "five star reviews" to a piece in order to reach their own review quota so they can post their own new piece as quickly as possible. (A problem that even the site moderator has addressed on more than one occasion).
I also found the formatting extremely frustrating, though I still can't say to this day if the fault was with their system or my own files (I suspect the latter, as I always have problems when I cut and paste my Word documents). No matter what I did, my stories would always end up looking weird on the site, with odd line breaks, etc. And then, the most frustrating of all, when people reviewed my stories, they would take up almost the entire review commenting on my story's format, rather than the content (as if I were an illiterate idiot with no idea how to type a story in standard format). I finally gave up in frustration, although there were many writers on there who kept telling me just to hang in there and work with it, that I would "get it" eventually. But I did, after one night when I literally spent hours re-formatting a document to post, only to have it (once again) look like sh** once it was posted. I was practically in tears. Obviously, it was a glitch I was never able to get a handle on, though as I said I still can't say if the fault was with their system or mine.
But a lot of people evidently are able to use the site without any such problems. And, if you have the time to invest in writing meaningful reviews, it can be a fun and constructive site (and even a bit addicting, because once you start posting you'll be curious to check your story's ranking, which is updated daily).
If you are simply posting work for critique, it is not considered the same as being published (no moreso than posting on the "Share Your Work" forum here). However, they do offer periodic contests with real cash prizes and opportunities for real publication. I don't know how satisfied any of the "winners" have been with the actual follow-up on these contests, but I would assume they are legit.
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