FictionPress
FictionPress is a website for amateur authors to post stories, poetry, rants and essays and receive feedback from other users in the form of reviews. Registration is free of charge and the website has over 100,000 users.
Over the years, FictionPress evolved from a purely fanfiction media to a site that embraced all forms; at the moment the most popular form of writing on it is poetry, but a good number of people also write political essays, articles and on other genres as well. The community is made up of groups who review each other and create off-shoot forums. Commonly, philosophical and political debates may occur between users.
Users are given a free bio page where they may include any personal or background information about themselves. Links to all their published poetry/prose are also present in their bio page. Other links on each user's bio page include their own "Favourite Stories" section and a "Favourite Authors" section which users can use to express their exceptional liking of a particular writing piece or even an author.
Features
FictionPress offers a wide array of poetry and fiction, with many different specific genres for each category. This allows readers to select their choice of preference easily, having only to click their favourite genre on the main page.
Also, on 18th November, 2004, FictionPress finally allowed submission of literature in almost any language on the planet, after a massive technical upgrade lasting for 24 hours, during which FictionPress.com was set at a read-only mode.
The languages supported include many Eastern-European languages and Asian languages, such as Korean, Japanese, Chinese, etc. Prior to the massive upgrade, non-english language submission and display support had been at best very weak and at worst unusable.
Another attraction of FictionPress is the easy upload. To successfully upload and publish a poem/prose piece requires no more than 10 minutes, or as fast as 2 minutes, depending on how much the user wants to edit his or her work before publishing. Nevertheless, the whole process is simple and user-friendly, even for first-timers.
After uploading a document, FictionPress has a "QuickEdit/Preview" function, allowing users to edit and preview the document with ease, so as to check for any errors before publishing.
Of course, even after publishing, users also can make changes to the poem/prose piece by re-uploading a corrected version and replacing the published version.
FictionPress also accepts the following 7 document formats:
- Plain Text (.txt)
- Rich Text Format (.rtf)
- HTML (.htm, .html)
- Microsoft Word (.doc)
- StarOffice (.sdw)
- OpenOffice.org (.sxw)
- WordPerfect (.wp, .wpd)