Not disagreeing with the other posters, purely sharing another perspective/ journey.
I make a living from my writing and I've never joined a critique group. When I started I thought this was some golden rule that can never be broken and asked an author friend for critique on the first few chapters. She had a complete hissy fit when I didn't implement her changes (which were 100% style choices and things like grammar - which essentially is a style choice when you're writing first person). Or word changes which were either a waste of time or just not something that would be in the character's vocabulary anyway.
I'm sure most find them really helpful but for me, it depends if the person is critiquing as a writer or critiquing as a reader. If a writer, do you even like their writing? And if you do, what are you learning from having them critique something you've already written that you wouldn't learn from reading more of their work and writing something new?
Readers are different. They know if something is boring them, or it's too confusing or predictable, or it kept them up all night, or they hated X character when she was supposed to be likeable. You get better at the actual words and sentences the more you practice and find your voice, it's the stuff up there that readers notice that takes actual talent / hard work / effort IMO and you're not going to get any of that by posting a single chapter for a bunch of amateur / unpublished / unsuccessful writers with maybe a slight chance you find someone who knows what they're talking about and you like what they're talking about.
That's just my two pennies.
And none of that means you should just publish any old shite either - I'm not advocating for that.
What I did was put the "from the heart" books to the side and wrote and published erotica for a while.
Why?
- The readers have extremely low expectations. Have you read some of the stuff on Amazon? If you can write English better than a ten year old you'll have a leg up. So you don't need to overthink it or rewrite it or play around with a comma for an entire afternoon. Just write as fast as you can, and work on building up stamina. I still write relatively fast even though I don't plot, usually 4k/day and maybe more in the evening if its a passion project but I can do 10k on a deadline. And now I know some things about some things, the first draft is just as clean as a final draft and ready for the line editor.
- It's short. Longer definitely sells, but why slog away on a 50k novel that the market didn't want when you could write 10 x 5k short stories and see what sticks? Even writing pretty slowly at 500wph is 10 hours work, which can be done over a weekend. You'll get far more experience writing 10 different 5k stories than someone who rewrites the same thing three times. Play with the pacing / dialogue / chapter endings / character voice / tense and practice making readers things you want them to feel.
If you can do that then you're essentially going through the entire self-pub process in the space of a long weekend. That's analysing the market to see what people are buying and how [insert what you'd ideally like to sell] meshes with that. Working out how the people looking for what you're selling are going to find it. Studying covers and either diy (fine for erotica) or pay $20 on fiver. Formatting. Keywords. Blurbs. Starting a newsletter. Learning how the ranks work. Spotting organic books from complete flops. Spotting books that are likely to take off if you put a bit of marketing spend behind them (don't spend a penny in erotica, but invaluable skill when you move to your chosen genre).
And of course, reviews. What are readers saying?
I found my beta reader who is absolutely fantastic and knows my current genre inside out after she read my third attempt at erotica (which was terrible if we're talking nuts and bolts of writing!) and reached out to me on facebook gushing over how much she liked the male lead.
So... three books in I know at least one thing I'm doing right, and I do it again.
Two years later I no longer write erotica shorts. I'm lucky to get a book under 70k.
But if your goal is to learn about the market of selling books, and you want a career and you want money, I think starting out publishing shit erotica is one of the best ways to start. I know a fair amount of top 100 ebook authors and they all started out doing that before moving into more serious genres.
Basically an apprenticeship where you can earn while you learn 🤷🏻♀️ (and get a few folks rocks off if you're good at it...)