I wanted to let the folks on this forum know about Inked Voices, a site that helps writers find critique groups and to run the groups online. The site is newly launched over the Summer after beta testing in the Spring and I'm working to get the word out.
I know that this is more of a commercial post. I learned about Hatrack recently through Kathleen's appearance on the Writing Excuses podcast and reached out to see if this would be okay. Thank you Kathleen for letting me post to this community!
Here is how it works: We help writers find groups through a search feature where writers can look for individuals with shared interests or existing groups. I also reach out to everybody to make suggestions and see if I can help. All of the groups are private and invitation-based and most are small. A range of 5-10 people is pretty common.
Groups each have their own shared space for discussions, submissions and shared files. A writer will submit a work using credits (earn 1 for each critique in the group) and that work will post to the group. Group members critique a clean copy with inline and general comments and the finished critique is shown together on the manuscript so that all group members can benefit from the comments. Email notifications about new posts and deadlines help keep things on track.
We are also adding webcasts on craft this Fall.
The hope is two-fold: 1) to help people find long-term, consistent groups; 2) to solve the problems of running a virtual critique group over email/Google Docs to make it richer and easier to manage.
It is a paid service, but I'm happy to extend you guys a discount if you want to try it (there's also a free trial). If there are folks here who are particularly interested in starting a group with other Hatrack writers, I'm also happy to facilitate that. Also, we have a New Users group, so if anyone is a technophobe, you can practice to get the hang of things.
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