One of the ingredients in the peer matching algorithm is the feedback you provide to those who critique your writing. This algorithm determines who critiques your work and whose work you critique. Do you think the questions asked in the review rating section are good or bad at gauging how detailed and well thought out a critique is? What questions should we ask instead? The review rating questions are below.

Jacob

Chapters are flying all over Review Fuse. We originally intended to only have first chapters submitted for critique. However, members have been submitting chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 for critique as well. As a result of book critique popularity we are looking for a better way to handle books.

The temporary solution is for you to find two or three authors on Review Fuse and critique each other’s books. We have set up the Get My Book Critiqued page to help authors find each other. This page also briefly explains how private groups can help with book critiques.

More importantly, we would like to develop a permanent solution for managing books critiques. How do you think we should facilitate the book critique process?

Jacob

In order to provide authors with timely critiques, a reviewer has 12 hours to complete a review once it is assigned. If the reviewer does not complete the review within this 12 hour limit we assign the work to someone else for review. Is this time period too long, too short, or just right?

We are thinking about changing the default review timeout to 5 hours and providing an option to extend the review timeout to 36 hours. What do you as an author and reviewer think of this idea?

Jacob

Update (March 16, 2009) - You now have 16 hours to finish an assigened critique.

We have ended our beta period and officially launched the site. We are now going to focus more of our efforts on spreading the word about our writing group. We are going to advertise at trade shows and in magazines. Where do you as a writer hang out? Do you have any thoughts on where/ways we could spread the word about our services? We are currently adding hundreds of writers each month, we would like to be adding thousands.

steve

The Review Fuse writing community has grown so much we decided to revamp our peer matching algorithm. We are now relying heavily on your “How am I doing” score on the My Account page to help us match you with your peers for critique. If you give detailed reviews that help others improve their writing we will match you with other great reviewers. If you give poorly thought out reviews you will be matched with similar authors. You will see a striking similarity between the quality of reviews you give and receive.

If you are worried about having a low “How am I doing” score you can go to the “Latest Reviews I’ve Given” section of the My Account page and click the view icon to redo a review. If you give a more detailed and helpful review you should get a higher score which will help you get more helpful reviews.

For the visual learner…

Peer Matching Algorithm
Before	After

Are you ready to ride? Then join our writing community.

Jacob

Our beta period will end on January 10, 2009. This will change a few things on our site.

• We will always offer a free account. A free account will allow members to give and receive peer critiques, but free accounts will not have access to the premium features. We will update the FAQ page by January 10 to reflect which features will be available to free members.
• All active members who joined Review Fuse before December 23, 2008 have been upgraded to a premium membership. These premium accounts will expire on July 1, 2009. These members will have a chance in February to extend their premium membership through July 1, 2010 for only $14.95.
  • An active member is anyone who has used Review Fuse in the last 2 months.
• All members who joined Review Fuse after December 23, 2008 can upgrade their free account to premium at no cost through January 9, 2009. These members will also be given a chance in February to extend their premium access for only $14.95.
• From January 10, 2009 through March 10, 2009 we will offer a special rate to new members who join our writing community. They will be able to purchase premium access for $29.95. After March 10 we will charge $49.95 for a premium account.

Please let us know if you have any questions and join Review Fuse now in order to take advantage of this great deal.

Jacob

It has been a great year at Review Fuse. It was just over a year ago when we started planning how to build a writing community where people could consistently receive quality critiques. While not every critique has met our standards, most of our members have rated the reviews they receive fairly high. For those of you who receive the occasional poorly thought out critique we apologize. We are trying to devise additional ways to consistently get you high quality critiques.

We launched version 1 of Review Fuse in July of 2008. Most of the founders looked at version 1 and said, that is not quite what we expected. So we put our noses to the grind stone and cranked out version 2 in late October, by ‘we’ I mean Steve, Josh, and Mike. This version has been very well received and it is the base for the current version of Review Fuse.

Recently, several people have asked me, how big is Review Fuse? My response to their question has been “compared to what?” In order to enable you to answer this question, I am providing a snap shot of the size of our community at the end of 2008.

We anticipate 300-400 new members will join our community each month during the first quarter of 2008. We appreciate everyone who has helped make this site a success. If you would like to join our expanding community please sign up.

Jacob

On December 24th we released Review HQ, making it easier to look at, analyze, and learn from the critiques you receive at Review Fuse.  You can access Review HQ by clicking the view icon in the “Latest Reviews I’ve Received” section of the My Account page. Review HQ provides 3 different ways to look at your reviews:

• One at a time – This is similar to the critique view we had in our previous version. Review HQ adds the ability to easily identify which “revision” of your work you are reviewing and it makes it easy to jump to the previous or next reviews.
• All on one page – This feature allows you to view at all of the critiques for each revision of a work at the same time.  Access this feature, by clicking on the “all on one page” button on the right hand side of the navigation bar.
• Only inline comments – Displays all of the inline comments for each revision of your work.

What are your thoughts about Review HQ? Please continue to let us know how we can improve Review Fuse. You must be a premium member to access Review HQ, it is still FREE to become a premium member so please log in and upgrade now, or join Review Fuse then upgrade.

Jacob

We recently added poetry and articles/essays as submission categories. We appreciate the Review Fuse members who helped us develop the review frameworks for these categories. Are there additional categories you would like us to add?

A new category often takes a few weeks to start running smoothly. The first members submit to a new category often find themselves stuck in review purgatory, all alone with no one to critique. We try to alleviate this problem by asking authors we work closely with to submit to these new categories. We appreciate your patience and help as we get these new categories running smoothly.

Jacob

Several members have asked us for a way to communicate with those who review their work. In order to better meet your needs Steve added a new feature to accommodate this last week. We intentionally made it a little hard to find because we want just a few people to try it out before we added prominent links to this feature on the My Account page. If you would like to be one of our testers please follow the steps outlined below and let us know what you think about this feature by commenting on this post.

1. Click on the “view icon” for either the “Latest Reviews I’ve Received” or “Latest Reviews I’ve Given” on the My Account page. See screen shot 1.
2. If you chose the “view icon” from the “Latest Reviews I’ve Received” section, please take a moment to rate the review if you have not already done so.  See screen shot 2. We use review ratings as part of our peer matching criteria, if you tend to give good reviews we will match you up with people who also tend to give good reviews and vice versa. By the end of next month review rating will be a much more significant factor in determining your peers for the assigned reviews.
3. Screen Shots 3, 4 and 5 show the two users interacting by posting messages to each other. Screen shot 5 also shows that you can choose to “redo a review.” This is primarily for new members who give low quality reviews on their first attempt. We wanted to provide a way for them to repent of this misdeed.

The “discuss this review” feature will become more prominent and easy to use over the next few weeks. Please let us know if you like it and how we can improve it. If you have not had a chance to do so please feel free join Review Fuse, after all it’s free.

Jacob