I absolutely agree that people should send feedback to authors who post to the big archives, which is part of the reason that I listed all the new authors who have posted to SSA (and Level Three, and Wild Coyote) above, to encourage people to read their stories there and comment. I hope this will happen; I've only had time to look up about five authors on that list today, but I know lots of people who are busy today are bookmarking this page and coming back to it later, so I expect it will generate feedback eventually.

I think it's just true, however, that posting stories on the archives doesn't initially tend to produce a lot of feedback, and that's always been true. People are lazy, and it's easy to drop a line at the bottom of a lj entry than to open up your email folder and have to type in an address. But I still think it's important to post at the big archives, because it gets you a lot more exposure than just posting on livejournal, at least before you're a well-known author. It's a trade-off, I think--but don't get discouraged.

Still, I would encourage you to get a livejournal. It's free, it's pretty easy to do, and we're a friendly bunch. I'd even be happy to make you an icon, if you'd like (I know for me when I started out that was a big deal, because I had *no* idea how to make icons and I really wanted a personalized one, not just some random one I snagged from an icon community).