Online Critique Sites
Critiques
Genres
Medium
Poetry Type
Warning Required?
Writing Prompts
Age Range
Minimum submission length
Maximum submission length
Novel chapters?
Full novels
Must critique before submitting?
Expected critique rate
Membership cost
Free trial period
ABCTales
What little public information there is on how to submit reviews is generic and buried in a sticky post on how to use the “Discuss writing from ABCtales.com” forum.
The FAQs are limited and fairly basic, which is consistent with the site itself.
The “Privacy Policy” page notes that, as a British site, it operates within the European Economic Area. That, however, is no longer true, since England left the European Union in 2020, so it’s not clear what the site’s privacy policy actually covers. The “Terms of use” are pretty standard, including a warning that any use of AI is not permitted on the site and the author of any works found to have used it will be asked to take it down within 24 hours. However, there’s no indication that posting such material will cause the poster to be removed or banned from the site.
While this is a discussion site more than a critique site, it does include a “Great Feedback” section. However, which posts make this list is based on member votes, and five is enough to make the first page.
The discussion forum has six major topic areas and some have a very large number of sub-topics and posts in them. Each story must have an age rating based on the UK film and video classification standards, which are described in the FAQs.
The site also offers weekly writing prompts.
Facebook
Established 2019
158 membersAbsolute Write Water Cooler
Visitors to the site can read what’s posted in the forums but have to join to participate in the conversations. All members must be 15 years old or older.
The two posts in the Newbie Guide! thread provide a lot of what a new member needs to know, as they should, but there’s a much more extensive set of FAQs as well. Individual forums may have their own rules on allowed or prohibited content.
Although this site is primarily intended as a discussion forum for writers, editors, agents, and publishers, there is a password-protected “Share Your Work” forum where members can post work to be critiqued. Submitters have to have written 50 “genuine, engaged” posts elsewhere on the site. See the “Share Your Work for Critique” FAQ entry for details.
Fan fiction and “real person fiction” are not allowed on the site “for legal reasons.”
AI-written or -assisted work, forum posts, or graphics (including a member’s avatar) are strictly prohibited. Members caught using AI will be banned. Members who create multiple, “sock puppet” accounts will also be banned.
All Poetry
The sister site to StoryWrite. See its write-up elsewhere on this site.
Some full submissions can be viewed by visitors, others only by members. The FAQ page, confusingly combined with the “Contact us” page, has extensive lists of FAQs and links to other help articles. Poems created using AI may be used so long as that is revealed; failing to do so will result in a ban from the site.
The site has a “trade comments” function where members can exchange long (detailed) or short (“encouraging”) critiques. Requires each comment to include “2 suggestions and at least 1 encouragement.” An “autorank” function evaluates poems on some parts of the site that uses an algorithm to compare a submitted poem to those “closest to the kind of style you’d find in a professional poetry journal.” It’s not clear how members or the site use this tool.
Members may run contests, but the moderators and administrators do not closely monitor them to make sure their rules are being followed.
The site hosts nearly 60 member-run groups centered around whatever the founder wanted. There are also half a dozen free, self-paced courses.
The site has an extensive Terms of Use and a thorough privacy policy.
Critique Circle
Most information about the site is available only to members, with one exception. The FAQs (also called the knowledge base) are very extensive and include five excellent tutorial videos, including three for new members. Other helpful videos are placed in topic areas in the Knowledge Base. There is a separate rules page and an “introductory letter.”
Submissions are put in a queue and can take as long as two weeks before they’re available to be critiqued. New members’ works become available on the Wednesday after they’re submitted. All submissions are only available to be reviewed for one week, from Wednesday to the following Tuesday at midnight UTC (Greenwich, England, Time). The author will be told when the piece will become available for review. Once the week has passed, members can read the critiques that were submitted.
Free members can submit only after earning enough credits. Credits earned for critiquing a piece are based on the length of the critique, but all critiques are expected to be at least 300 words long.
AI-generated content—as a submission, critique, or forum post—is prohibited and grounds for immediate termination of a member’s account.
New members are expected to begin participating in the first week. If they don’t, their name is removed from the member list, although the membership is not canceled.
Critique.org
The material on the About (https://www.critique.org/c/about.ht), Rules (https://www.critique.org/c/rules.ht), Critter Diplomacy (https://www.critters.org/c/diplomacy.ht), and FAQ (https://www.critique.org/c/faq.ht) pages is extensive and informative (maybe overwhelmingly so), but the FAQs haven’t been updated since 2021 and have some antiquated references (such as to Netscape). Accepts submissions and critiques only via email, but with very specific format requirements.
The “workshops” for each genre or category have their own submission queues, credit scoring and tracking, etc. In addition to the fiction genres listed below, there are workshops for nonfiction, including creative nonfiction; scripts/screenplays/stage plays; video/film; music/audio (including podcasts); photography; art/painting/drawing; apps/software/games; website design
Members receive lists of submissions for review by email and on a password-protected web page every Wednesday; they choose which to review. Submissions may wait 3–4 weeks before becoming available for review.
Submissions are open for critique for only one week. Critiques will start to arrive late in the week when they’re available. Members are told to expect an average of 15–20 reviews.
All material runs through one individual, which raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of the site.
Eratosphere
This is a forum-based site. The extensive FAQs cover what members need to know about using the forums and threads, creating and maintaining a user profile, and reading and posting messages. Not only are submissions to the site not archived, they’re “pruned” approximately every two months.
The site is part of the Able Muse online and print magazine. It primarily focuses on poetry, although there’s a limited space for literary fiction only. Members have the ability to keep Google or other search engines from indexing a post, which prevents overzealous contests from claiming the piece has already been published.
Faith Writers
The primary purpose of this site is to provide a place for Christian writers to publish their work and promote their books.
While the site does feature a “Critique Circle” (not to be confused with the website of the same name), it appears to be a very secondary feature and is accessible only through the site map or the help link—both of which are in the footer—rather than from the home page menu.
The information on how to submit work or critiques, and how to give and receive critiques is available only in pop-up windows and is fairly basic. The site does allow and encourage authors to ask questions of their critiquers if they don’t understand a comment.
The pages of the “tour” of the “Critique Circle” also appears in a pop-up window that is very small and hard to read, and cannot be made larger.
The FAQ thread in the forum covers over 40 topics relating to the site, but the most recent one dates to 2012 and the separate FAQ page in the “Help For Writers” section is accessible only through a link buried in the footer.
Paid members may receive one critique from a professional author for free, and all members can pay $3.00 per page for them. Interactive training courses are available at no cost: two to Silver (free) members, six to Gold tier members, and all 12 to Platinum members. Courses may be purchased individually for $19.95 each.
The site also provides contacts with professional editors.
Members may submit 150 to 750 word responses to weekly “challenges” at levels from “Beginner” to “Master.”
The site offers a way to hire Christian writers and editors, and is willing to cross-promote “established Christian website, blog or print magazine with decent traffic.”
Inked Voices
The FAQ page goes into more detail on these and other subjects. There’s also a Code of Conduct page.
This site is unusual in that it is intended exclusively to support critique groups, both ones that already exist and ones formed within the site. A listing of groups looking for members is available but a bit hard to find. Each listing indicates how many members the group wants to have, ranging from 3 to 200 (which seems highly impractical), as well as how many they already have. Members can also create a group if they don’t find any to their liking.
Some self-formed groups do critiques, others are only for “accountability,” that is, keeping their members on track. An optional credit system can be set up by each group to help ensure all members are critiquing as well as submitting.
Discounts are available for existing critique groups (15 percent for the first year only) and full-time students (30 percent, must prove enrollment). Workshops and recorded lectures are available for members and non-members on a wide variety of topics. A multi-page Writing Groups 101 section provides a great deal of useful information on how to form and successfully run a critique group (whether on Inked Voices or not). A two-page “critique cheat sheet” doesn’t seem to be available via the site, although the link still works.
Literotica
Their 17 separate FAQ pages cover pretty much every aspect of the site. The Literotica Content Guidelines, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy (last two buried in the footer) pages are especially important. In addition to the content guidelines, there are publishing guidelines for stories, audio (written pieces read aloud), and artwork, including comics.
The site’s undated AI Policy does not prohibit using AI tools for things like checking spelling and grammar, but discourages the use of AI-generated work, including text rewritten by AI software. The policy also bans using work posted on the site to train AIs.
All work will be reviewed by an editor before it appears on the site. If a piece is sent back to the author, the editor will provide information on why so the author can try to fix it and resubmit. While they have a “story feedback” forum, only a group of volunteer editors provides critique.
This submission and feedback process with an editor occurs via email and is not on the main site, beyond finding an editor to contact. Readers can make comments on a piece but this does not necessarily constitute critique. Readers can rate pieces on a 1 – 5 scale, called “voting.” These scores are used to identify the most popular pieces.
Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror
This site seems to be focused primarily on writing and reviewing short stories, so there’s extremely limited information on how to submit a longer work, like a novella, or chapters from a novel.
The site has extensive FAQ and How to Review pages but they’re very hard to find. The Member Agreement and Privacy Policy pages are accessible from the footer. The Writer’s Resources page also has a very extensive list of information sources on just about everything an SF/F/H writer would want to know. Unfortunately, it too is hard to find.
Members may have up to three pieces available for review at any one time. Submissions remain available for review for three months. They can still be read after that, but not reviewed. “Adult” content is permitted “up to the point that would reasonably appear in a book shelved in the fantasy/SF/horror section at a bookstore.” Reviewers may also add a rating on a 1 (“Doesn’t Work”) to 5 (“Excellent”) scale, in each of five writing-related categories. What these categories are, and the full explanation of the rating scale is buried on the “How to Review” page.
Members can make “lists” of preferred reviewers, but it doesn’t appear they can limit reviews to just them. Lists can be used for many other purposes too. Groups of members can create temporary focus groups, which operate like small workshops. Agents and editors may become professional members but need to pass a screening first. “Resident editors” (currently three professional authors) pick one submission in each of four categories which they review in a monthly newsletter.
Scholarships are available for members experiencing financial hardship or have other problems paying the fee.