Thanks everyone who commented here and sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you. I'm juggling things to do right now, but I want you to know I appreciate your feedback and conversation.
Yup. I've noticed groups allowing self promotion often end up being ONLY self promotion
I've noticed this too, unless they firmly rein it in. Even then, there are still people posting in the wrong places. I post in ones that are made for that purpose, but you still get annoying things like people posting multiple times in a row and they're people whose books I would avoid out of principle.
Putting my old designer head on for a moment, I would be thinking of making an open site where authors could publish attractive sections of their work indexed by keyword and genre/ sub-genre, so potential readers could scan for something of particular interest written in a style they would enjoy.
I would make feedback private to the author to prevent trolling.
For example, I would like looking for Roman-British fiction to read.
When I searched for works of this type on Amazon I was presented with pretty poor subject matches.
I imagine the sort of authoring site I am looking for probably already exists, just haven't found it yet.
I know Goodreads has an option to share excerpts but it's more quotes I think than sample chapters. Amazon has that option to look into a Kindle book and read a percentage of it before you buy it, and Smashwords has sample downloads and you can set the percentage. What I've found with the sample downloads with Smashwords (though it might've been Amazon too) is there seem to have been people harvesting free sample text and then listing fake book sale links or gimmicky web sites online to try and profit from it. They make it sound like they're selling my book or giving a copy of it away when you sign up to something, but they're just mis-using content put out there. You need to be careful of stuff like that, but I know there are plenty of authors who offer free sample chapters or stories on their web sites, in newsletters and things like that. I suppose they're not really for critiquing work though, they're to sell it or to offer it as a perk for signing up to something/to try and sell other books.
I was wondering if you can just use Facebook links to promote your book to individuals and ask them to post on their pages to help out a starving writer? I like the idea of posting excerpts from your book and inviting them to pass the word to their friends. Instead of the group pages that list tons of writers, you would get more more attention, I would think.
(btw, Boatman, don't be afraid to list your partner. I have it on good authority she does not mind. 
)
You can do that and I've done it before (asking friends to share a link). However, only something like 2 friends shared my post. I generally don't ask for shares in groups, but there's no reason you couldn't. Maybe you'd get some more shares that way. If you wanted to share a long excerpt, you'd probably be better off having that on a web site or something and sharing a link to it. There are some groups that do offer critiques. There's one called
Authors that offers Critiques on a Sunday. It's not one of the more popular subjects (usually it doesn't get many posts). The link is
here.
