To publish your work on Scribophile, just head on over to My Desk and click Publish a Work on the left-hand toolbar. You'll find that you need to have enough karma points before you can publish a work. There are lots of ways to get more karma points—you can read about them here. Every time you publish a work, you use up a certain amount of karma points. This system helps ensure that everyone gets useful critiques and keeps the comments and critiques flowing!

Once you have enough karma points to publish, just can type your work directly into the Scribophile editor, or you can type it up in a program like Word and then paste it in. Follow the prompts and voila! You've just published your first work!

Karma is how Scribophile helps ensure that everyone who publishes a work gets feedback on it. Your karma point amount is a reflection of how many works you've published versus how you've contributed to the Scribophile community. Publishing a work on Scribophile drains a certain amount of karma points from your total—you can't publish until you have enough karma points!

Once your karma points have been drained, there are lots of ways to replenish them. You gain karma points whenever you do any of the following:

• Write a critique or comment on somebody else's work. You get more karma points for writing longer critiques.
• Having your critiques or comments be rated highly by other people. When other people rate your critiques highly (using the stars in the lower right corner of your critique or comment), that means that your critique was a good one, and deserving of some extra karma. You're rewarded accordingly!
• Rating the works, critiques and comments of others. By rating works and critiques on Scribophile, you provide valuable feedback to your fellow authors, and help maintain a standard of quality in the Scribophile community. You earn a little karma each time you rate something.

You get the most karma points by writing longer critiques—these take the most effort. You get the least karma points by rating works and critiques.

Tags are how Scribophile categorizes works. They're short, one or two words, and should accurately describe your work. Scribophile has several pre-made tags for common genres that you can use to categorize your work, but if it doesn't fit in our categorizations, just go ahead and make up your own tag!

The review queue is a list of works that have been recently published and are up for review by the Scribophile community. Every work gets on the review queue eventually. Once on the review queue, a work will stay there until it gets 2 or more comments, or until it's been on the review queue for 2 days (whichever comes first)—then it's removed to make room for another work. The review queue is another way that Scribophile makes sure that your work gets feedback. You can read more about the review queue here.

Scribophile lets you retain all the rights to the works you post on our site—you can display, edit, and remove them as you please. However, many publishers consider works that have been posted on public forums or on the general internet to have lost their "first publication rights." To help you retain your first publication rights, Scribophile allows you to mark your works as "restricted." Restricted works are only viewable by other Scribophile members and not the internet at large, thus maintaining your first publication rights untouched. Scribophile isn't a publisher; we just want to make you the best writer you can be!

That's your reputation on the site. Your reputation is a way to keep track of where you stand in the Scribophile community. Everyone starts at 0. As you publish works, write comments and critiques, post in the forums, and so on, your reputation increases. If people rate your comments low, your reputation decreases—so make sure to write helpful comments! Almost everything you do on the site affects your reputation somehow.

Scribophile coins are the virtual currency used around the site to buy gifts and services. Say that you got a really helpful critique, and you want to thank the reviewer with a Scribophile gift—you would use your coins to send that gift to them. If you don't have a Pro account, you can also use Scribophile coins to send private messages and bulletins to other members. Coins will be credited to your account instantly after you purchase them.

Scribophile gifts are virtual gifts that you can send to any other Scribophile member. Generally, Scribophile gifts cost coins to purchase. You can send them privately, anonymously, or with a personal message. Give them to say "thanks" for a helpful review, to let a member know that you're thinking of them, to a favorite author of yours, or to a supportive fan. Give a Scribophile gift to anyone!

Writer's Circles are groups within Scribophile made up of writers with similar interests. Think of a writing circles in the good old days... authors would get together now and then, read their work aloud, get feedback from their fellows, and have a lively discussion. Scribophile circles are like that—they're for meeting other writers, sharing your works with them, and discussing whatever you feel like talking about. Each circle has its own message board and collection of works that its authors have submitted. Create one or join one to start meeting other authors!

Go to the Manage Works page in My Desk. Each of your works has stars in the lower right corner. These stars represent the average rating that other users have given your work.

The red stripe appears over your profile image when you've purchased a Pro membership. It's just another little way for us to say "Thanks" to the members supporting this site.

Don't worry, critiquing is easy! Just write what you as a reader thought of the work. How do you think you would make it better?

There are lots of places where you can learn how to write more in-depth critiques. Here are just a few:

But I Don't Know How to Critique!, by V. Anne Arden
How to Write a Critique of a Novel, by Janice E. Smith
How to Write a Great Critique, by Scribophile
How to Write a Poetry Critique, by eHow
How to Critique Fiction, by Victory Crayne
The Diplomatic Critiquer, by Andrew Burt

After a work hits the review queue, it can be critiqued or commented on for 30 more days. After 30 days, the work is archived. This means that you'll still be able to read the work and any critiques and comments it has received, but you won't be able to critique it.

Archiving older works encourage authors to spend time critiquing newer material and to leave a more focused selection of works to review.

You can always re-publish a work that's in the archives. Re-publishing a work gives it another chance at the review queue and lets it stick around for 30 more days. To re-publish, just find your work in My Desk and click the "re-publish" option.