This is a quick guide that will give you step-by-step instructions on how to use our site, set up your profile and everything in-between.

You have gone onto our site, and you wonder what to do next…
Go to ‘Sign up today’ and start creating your profile. Decide on a ‘Username’ and a ‘password’ which must be typed in lower case. Select your ‘location’. If the location you live in is not within this list, please select ‘London’ as your location and then you can amend this once your profile has been set up. If you cannot think of what to write in the ‘About me’ section – dont worry! You can always type you name into this field, or a few !!! marks and worry about filling that out later.

How do I upload a picture?
After you have completed your ‘Create an Account’ form it will bring you to a page which will ask you to change your ’Avatar’ (for those of you like me who had never heard of this before, ‘Avatar’ means ‘picture’) If you select a picture and your upload is unsuccsessfull then it could be because your JPEG is too large. Websites like facebook are able to upload photo’s of any size because of their large domain whereas other sites are a little more restricted with size (This is something I have just learned this week!). In this event, please send us an email at: writeandshare2011@gmail.com and we will upload it for you. Once you have completed this page an email will be sent to your account. You will need to click on the link and then sign into the website with your username and password.

What do I do after I have set up my profile?
So now you have created your profile and uploaded your picture and signed into the website. You should now see on the top of your screen ‘Welcome back……’. This is how you know you are logged in. You can now look at adding samples of your work and your stories to your profile. For this, go to ‘View Profile’ and then go to ‘Stories’. You will then be required to ‘Add new story’. You will be asked the title of your story and a small story summary. Dont worry if your not sure what to write in this, you can repeat your story title until you are ready to fill this field out. In the ‘Content’ section you then need to go to your story and copy the text you want to share. If you want to share the whole document you can press ‘ctrl A’ and this will highlight the whole text for you. Then press ‘ctrl C’ to copy your work. Then you click back onto the ‘content’ section of our site and press ‘ctrl V’ to paste it. Click ‘Save story’ and away you go.

I have added a new story – how do other users see my work?
Once you have uploaded a new story your work will then be featured on our ‘Home Page’ so that other users can click directly from the ‘Home Page’ onto your story. Once another user adds a new story, your post on our ‘Home Page’ will be replaced with theirs and you can view your story by going to ‘Find Stories’ and scrolling down. So the amount of time your story features on our ‘Home Page’ is dependant on how many new users add new stories directly after yours.

My profile has been set up – what else can I do on the site?
You can browse our ‘Writers’ and add other writers as friends if you wish so. You can also read their stories and comment on them giving feedback or critique to help them better their work. You can also send them a message requesting they read your work, or send them a message asking them more questions about themselves. This is the whole point of the site – so that you can start connecting with other writers and getting feedback. I did so with my story ‘Catch The Man – If You Can’ and have amazing comments of critique and have gone away and used this advice to make my story better, and the only way I did this was by talking to other writers and asking them to read my work!

If you feel you have advice you would like to share with other writers about the publishing world, agents, events or anything you think would benefit others you can do us an email and we can feature your ‘blog’ on our ‘Latest Blogs’ section. If you have any events you would like to make other writers aware of, again you can email us and we will add this to our ‘Upcoming events’. If you would like to create an event for writers then again please feel free to email us details.

I have more questions….?
Then please dont hesitate to email us at: writeandshare2011@gmail.com and I will get back to you promtly.