Furry Writers' Guild Forum

"The Review Service" on FA

Saw an FA ad for this today. They’re offering “reviews” for pay, which raised my eyebrows until I realized they’re just using “review” to mean “critique.” They say they have a team of “around a dozen reviewers” but don’t name names (which I guess could be to protect the people involved so they’re not targets for customers who expect a more positive assessment and then get upset, or something like that).

http://www.furaffinity.net/user/thereviewservice/

I admit my first reaction is that it’s kind of sad that people will pay for this type of thing when there are so many free crit opportunities available – but on the other hand, those opportunities (like our critique board) do usually involve having to give critique as well as receive it, and I can see where for some people it might seem easier to just pay and be done with it. (I can understand paying for full-on editing, of course, but from looking over their samples, this strikes me as no more detail than you’d get in a crit from a decent peer group.)

Anyway, just found it interesting…

I posted about this during one of the last few coffeehouse chats. Had pretty much the same reaction.

Of course, that makes it really hard to determine if the reviewers actually know the first thing about writing…

I’m with Rabbit on this one.

They’ve since posted a journal entry that includes bios for some of their (still pseudonymous) team members. They’ve also expanded to other content besides writing.

It still gets under my skin, though, that for all that supposed experience, they haven’t picked up on the fact (or are deliberately ignoring) that writers call this stuff CRITIQUE, not “reviews.”

I…um…I’ve got nothing.