beta readers

[mizkit]

I did something very unusual this weekend, which was send a book out to beta readers. Normally I…don’t do that. Broadly speaking I feel writing a book is largely a closed loop between myself and my editor: she’s the source of feedback that I need, and I generally find adding more people in to that cycle to be very stressful.

I am, in fact, finding

Comments

[deborahblakehps]

My beta readers are gems, one and all. They have different strengths (my mother, also a writer, is the Queen of all things technical, for instance, and I have a few that are unpublished writers who are uber-readers), and they all look at things slightly differently from each other and from my agent and actual editor. (Well, I have a new editor. We'll see how she looks at things.) I don't send all the books to all the betas--in part, because not everyone has that kind of time. But there have been times lately when I'm pretty sure that without beta readers, there would have been no book.

Does that mean I like getting their feedback? Uh, no. They all hate me too :-)

[msagara]

I know one writer who has sent his book to 100+ beta readers.

But... I’m like you, in that it’s a closed loop internally. I already have the I’m a terrible writer, this book is awful, this will be the end of my career because everyone will hate it and realize I can’t actually write internal writer voice droning on in the background