If you’re unfamiliar with the term “beta readers,” they read your manuscript’s well-drafted, polished version before self-publishing. They are there to give first impressions and point out parts of your novel that confuse them; bonus points to beta readers who already enjoy reading your genre/niche. “Alpha readers” would be the step before this; this type of reader reads your manuscript knowing it still needs much work. These folks would help with more structural advice and, as a result, have more overall influence in shaping your book.

Finding and utilizing beta readers is a pretty important step you will want to take before self-publishing your novel.

Why Use Beta Readers?

When you’ve been writing your novel and living in your self-created world full of interesting characters, it might seem a little silly or “extra” to involve others in the finalization process. Why would you need their input when you’ve done a lot of self-editing and already know it will be a hit?

Well, more often than not, some of these details got stuck in your mind. You’ve stared at the same Microsoft Word document for over a year and caught every detail that tried to get away from you. Except… you didn’t because you’ve been staring at the same words for over a year. So now you’ve gone word-blind. Oh no!

At this moment, having a second set of eyes comes in handy. They might notice typos better, point out confusing sentences or paragraphs, and highlight areas where continuity is an issue. All of these are easy to miss once you’ve gone word-blind.

Another typical snafu is that you have this beautiful scene in your novel or have a pretty setting that you want to share with your readers… and it has stayed in your mind. It’s stuck because there wasn’t enough world-building to make it to the page. But the good news is that beta readers can help with that.

Make the Most of Beta Readers

Once you have a handful of beta readers, you can do a couple of things to ensure that they will be helpful to your end goal.

The first is to gauge what books they’ve read and enjoyed. If they don’t already read your genre, it could be a harder sell and skew the types of advice they may have. But once you know they are interested in reading your manuscript, it’s helpful to find ways to help focus their efforts.

For example, my novel The Displaced takes place about one hundred years in the future. Many things are similar when it comes to the setting. Still, there were crucial differences in technology and consequences to human overpopulation that I wanted to highlight in my manuscript. There were plenty of details that I thought I had fleshed out well. Still, my beta readers had numerous questions, leading to a better description.

If you want to focus your beta readers’ efforts, one thing you can do is to come up with a list of questions beforehand. To avoid generic comments like “I liked it” or “Let me know when you publish so I can buy a copy,” direct their efforts. Asking directed questions can get you the answers and responses that will give constructive compliments and criticisms. Here are some examples of questions you can ask your beta readers:

“Who are your favorite and least favorite characters, and why?”
“Did any scenes or chapters confuse or lose you?”
“Did you find certain parts of the book boring? Which parts were exciting?”

You can change and add to the list of questions to fit your book and your genre, but you get the idea. Having these pointed questions could help guide your beta readers to give responses you find helpful overall.

What Beta Readers Shouldn’t Do

As I mentioned at the top of this article, using beta readers is a step you take late in the self-publishing process. You should have your copy mostly cleaned up and typo-free at this stage. This can be done in many ways, including self-editing, hiring an editor, and running programs like Grammarly to help catch things you missed.

Another thing to consider is that they should not have access to the only copy of your manuscript. This should go without saying, but you want to ensure nothing gets accidentally deleted or changed permanently.

When writing my book, I used Google Docs to put together my manuscript. There has been a lot of debate about which programs are the best to use when writing, but that is for another blog post. In Google Docs, one of the things I liked about the program is that I could auto-save my writing and the system for other “editors” to comment on the document. This helped to clear up the urge to change the document itself. (This is also an option if you choose, but I like to keep possible edits separate.) I would find it very visually overwhelming if there were too many changes to the document.

The second thing I loved about Google Docs is if something did, God forbid, happen to the copy, I could easily find the previous version to revert to. (Another feature available elsewhere, Google Docs is just the program I was most familiar with.) However, it’s not on the beta reader to ensure everything goes smoothly.

How to Find Beta Readers

The next important thing you need to know is where to find a beta reader and which ones would be more productive for your overall writing goals.

The first and most commonly used option is family and friends. It’s the route that I took with my novel. I liked having easy access to the person to ask them questions, mainly if I thought of one outside the list above. But, this method can also lead to the possibility that they will compliment your work because they feel like they should – or you could suspect it. While it’s great to pick others’ brains about specific items in your book, having other writers in your ear is sometimes helpful.

One option I plan to explore for my next novel, The Favored, is reaching out to others who enjoy and write the same genre. I want to utilize some of the Facebook groups I am in to do an equal swap, where we both read over each others’ manuscripts and give feedback based on reading and writing crime novels. Swapping like this leads to better feedback and a more objective set of feedback for you to improve your work in progress.

You should be able to get away with not having to pay for beta readers. There are plenty of services you can pay to help with the endeavor or give you a place to post your story for beta reading. Still, you can easily get away without paying for it.

As always, please let me know if there are options that I didn’t cover!