Beta Readers: The Good, the Bad, and Where to Find Them

Beta readers: Where to find them. How to work with them.

A good beta reader can be incredibly valuable. A bad one… not so much.

Let’s face it, when you finish your book and have taken your self-edits as far as you can, with each subsequent read, you get further and further from seeing it clearly.

One day you think it’ll be a Pulitzer contender, then next day you think it’s so horrendous you want to throw it in the trash. You’re almost certainly wrong on both counts, and you’re definitely not in the best mindset to continue tinkering.

The right beta reader can cut through that fog and show you what’s working and what’s not quite there yet.

They can also save you a ton of time and money by helping you take the book up a notch before you spend money on an editor. You’ll absolutely get more bang for your buck if your editor isn’t wasting time fixing obvious things like a sagging middle, an unbelievable ending, a bland setting, or a plot full of gaping holes.

And if you’re not hiring an editor, a beta reader can save you from embarrassing yourself by sending a half-baked book to literary agents or publishing it for readers.

On the other hand, if you ask for feedback from the wrong person, or you ask for the wrong type of feedback from the right person, it can be a calamity.

Have you ever been in a writing class or workshop where you got so many wildly different opinions that you left lost, stressed, and second-guessing the very point of your manuscript? I have!

Can you imagine if Jane Austen listened to the wrong readers and cut the entire Wickham storyline from Pride and Prejudice, instead throwing in a dragon or two? Okay, maybe most readers won’t be that bad, but there are still a number of ways to ensure a helpful, rather than frustrating, experience.

What is a beta reader?

We used to call them early readers, but lately these people are often called beta readers, inspired by the term beta user, which software companies use for people who test the first, buggy versions of their product.

Trust me, if your book is recently finished, it’s hella buggy.

If you want to get technical about terms, you might say an early reader is someone who reads bits and pieces of your book before it’s finished and a beta reader doesn’t read it until after it’s a finished book…but really, there’s no reason to distinguish between those. Long before software existed, writers have been requesting opinions on drafts of various stages.

Basically, this is anyone you’re not paying as an editor, whom you can trust to give you helpful suggestions before you begin the next step in the process.

Ideally they’ll give you feedback on overarching elements you can fix on your own before bringing in a paid editor.

For fiction, they might let you know whether or not the dialogue is believable, the characters are cliched, and if the story stays interesting or slows down in certain parts.

For non-fiction, they may be able to point out where the arguments are most and least effective and whether or not your information and illustrations are clear.

What a beta reader isn’t

The purpose here isn’t to fine tune each sentence, correct your grammar, or to offer moral support. Well, unless it is — I’ll admit there’s something to be said for having a loving friend tell you how great your book is, but if that’s the only read you get, you’re not helping yourself.

I have a friend like this. She’ll read anything I send her, but unless it’s a total dumpster fire of a piece, she’s going to tell me it’s perfect. There are probably days that I could use her encouragement, but it’s never going to get me ready for submission.

Why not just hire an editor or put your book out there?

As I said, it can save you time and money, helping you bring a messy draft to a sold manuscript worth investing in.

Just last month, I saw this in action. A client came to me with a memoir that was shockingly good for someone with no writing experience. He attributed his success to a number of friends who read the book and told him where they were getting stuck. Okay, they all told him they wanted to throw the book at the wall or in the trash in the exact same spots.

Although their opinions weren’t professional, they were enormously valuable and showed him where he needed to spend more time revising. Instead of paying me to point out the obvious and help him make a boring and scattered draft into a slightly more readable one, we were able to start from a more advanced place. We worked on making the characters richer, the store more focused and more exciting. We finessed the opening and made sure the ending had even more impact. I feel very confident his book will soon be publishable.

Where to find beta readers

Ask friends and family. Just remember that you don’t want to waste each other’s time. If all you’re looking for (or they’re capable of giving) is a pat on the back, that won’t be useful. To make the most of the experience, your readers will need guidelines and specific things to look for. (More on that below.)

Trade with writer friends. If you don’t yet have a critique group or writers who you occasionally trade pages with, then get cracking. It’s no fun to have a writing life without a community. Whether online or in person, take courses, go to conferences, or join groups. I’ve kept in touch with writers from the very first classes I took, and it’s been incredibly fulfilling to go through this crazy publishing journey together.

Join an online writing group. There are an untold number of Facebook groups and even paid groups to join. It’s very common to trade manuscripts with another writer, so just post and ask.

Hire a reader (maybe). It’s possible to hire beta readers on sites like Upwork and Fiverr, but I’ve found that most people listed on there are actually selling their editing or proofreading services, which is something entirely different.

The point of an early reader is to think critically about big overarching problems so you can address those before spending good money on a pro editor.

If you’re searching for beta readers, that’s probably because you don’t feel ready for an editor yet. Plus, that’s a role you want to hire very carefully for, choosing someone who is skilled at helping writers better execute their own vision, not someone who fancies themselves good at English and will just point out “errors” and tell you how they would have written the book.

Tips for making the most out of the beta-read experience

1. Get more than one perspective: Ideally, if you have multiple readers, some are writers who can comment on craft, and some are just book enthusiasts who can describe the layreader’s experience. If one of them is immersed in your genre, maybe also try someone who isn’t.

2. “Don’t be a feedback bitch,” as my grad school professor Mark Haskell Smith would say. What he means is that if you try to incorporate every change someone suggests, you’ll do a lot of wheel spinning and you’ll probably end up with a confusing and uneven draft.

I saw this one recently too. A talented and experienced writer came to me with a draft that had a lot of selling points but was really uneven — some parts bogged down in unnecessary dialogue, others were so silent I was dying to hear even one line from a character, any character. Some sections had me turning the pages. Those things aren’t abnormal (read some of my own drafts!), but I’ve rarely seen it to such a head-scratching degree. It was almost like a different person had written some of those chapters.

When we got on the phone for our post-editing consultation, I found out why. Almost every time I made a suggestion, she’d get frustrated because previous versions incorporated my exact point, but one person or another from her writing group had suggested a change. It was like she was trying out each of her readers’ styles of writing when what she needed to do was figure out her own way of addressing common concerns, using her own voice.

Although it can be helpful to get more than one person’s thoughts, it can also be maddening, especially if you start making every change someone suggests. Whenever you get any feedback, even from an experienced editor, sleep on it, digest it, then experiment with it, do a gut check, and always, always keep your original draft.

If there are too many cooks in the kitchen, look for commonalities. Even if they have different suggestions for fixing a perceived problem, are they getting lost or bored in the same sections, are they thrown off by the same topic or character? If so, how would you fix it.

Regarding that gut check, if multiple readers get stuck in the same place, but you think it’s perfect as is, don’t disregard them. They may not be able to articulate the problem in a way you can hear, and their idea for solving it might not be right, but there is a problem. Take your time puzzling it out!

3. Consider the source before you start making big changes

Are they naturally easy on you or hard?

One friend who is an excellent critique partner — and a pro editor — is the opposite of the gentle friend I mentioned above. She’s hugely helpful if I keep her personality in mind when I get her suggestions. It’s useful to remember that she only ever points out the bad, not the good, and that her written critiques sound rather terse. In fact, I can assume that she loved whatever she didn’t call out because if not, she wouldn’t have bothered to put so much thought into it. If I didn’t know that’s just her style, her feedback might derail me!

Is there something about your reader that would make them see your book in a certain light? There are so many variables here that it’s hard to describe, but let me give you a personal example. In my novel, Love Me Anyway, two of the characters are having an affair. Some people will hate those characters no matter what, so while their critiques are valuable — in some ways especially helpful — I won’t kill off a character just because they suggested it. ;-)

If this reader is also a writer, is their style or genre like yours? If not, take their advice on craft issues like character development and dialogue seriously, but be careful if they’re pushing you toward a different style of writing or somewhere structurally outside the norms of your genre.

In one grad school workshop, we had a guy writing in the fantasy genre. None of us had any experience reading or writing fantasy, so we kept harping on things that turned out to be expected conventions in the genre. We were all totally wrong. He bested all of us in getting one of the top agents in the country and selling his book for a fortune. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a big-screen adaptation of it soon.

4. Give your readers guidelines:

Just asking them if they liked the book won’t be helpful for either of you. You’ll hear them hem and haw and you’ll want to jump off a cliff, or they’ll tell you it’s brilliant already, wasting your time, or you could end up going around in circles addressing various readers’ suggestions for problems that may or may not really exist.

First note the things you’re concerned about. If you don’t know if the structure is working or you’re afraid it slows down too much in the middle, make sure to ask them about that.