Six things to do in your first sitting on GS Poetry, in order, so you do not have to decide where to start.
You are one of a small group testing GS Poetry before it opens to everyone. This page is the short path through the site: six things, in order, that between them touch everything we most need eyes on. It takes about 15 minutes, and you can stop after any step and pick it up later.
You do not need to read anything else first. Each step links to the full article in the Support Center if you want the detail, but the step itself tells you enough to do it.
If something breaks, tell us right then. Use the feedback button in the corner of the page. It stays with you everywhere on the site, so you never have to leave what you were doing or remember it for later. A half-finished note about a button that did nothing is more useful to us than a polished one written three days after.
Add a photo, a cover image, and a couple of lines about your writing. Readers decide whether to follow you from this page more than from anywhere else, so it is worth three minutes before you post anything.
Nothing here is permanent. You can come back and change all of it later.
Bring something you have already written. Paste it in, give it a title, pick at least one category, and publish. Your line breaks and stanza spacing come through exactly as you type them.
If you would rather not publish to everyone yet, set the privacy dropdown to Private and only people you send the link to can open it. The rest of this guide still works.
Open a poem that catches you and leave a real comment. Name the line that landed, or ask the poet a question. "Nice poem" is the one thing we would rather you skip.
This is the flow that makes or breaks a poetry site, so tell us how it felt: slow, awkward, fine.
Follow at least two people. Two is not an arbitrary number: your home stream is built from who you follow, and with an empty follow list there is nothing in it to judge.
Pick poets whose work you would read again. You can unfollow any of them later without a fuss.
Some testers were given GS Pro for the alpha. If you are one of them, spend a minute inside any one of its features and tell us whether it felt worth paying for. The richer composer and the deeper analytics are the two most people reach for first.
If you were not given GS Pro, skip this one. It is not part of your run, and nothing later depends on it.
Your stats page is where you see how the poem you just published is doing. On day one the numbers will be small or zero, which is expected and still worth a look, because this is the page you will keep coming back to.
Tell us if any number on it confused you. That is the most useful thing you can report about this page.
Something will. That is what this round is for, and a broken thing you tell us about today is worth more than a hundred that go quietly unmentioned.
There is more on what makes a report easy to act on in Sending feedback and feature requests.
That is the whole first sitting. After this, use the site the way you would if it were already yours: write when you feel like writing, read when you do not.