On December 15th, I delivered my book to three Beta Readers for review. It’s exciting to be at this stage of the process!
I started by reviewing writer’s blogs about what to expect from Beta Readers. In the beginning, Beta Readers were friends and family that offered to read your book and give you their opinion. You could also do trades with other aspiring writers by offering to read their book.
There are pros and cons to this option. Perhaps the main benefit is that this is a free service. But, your book may not get read in a timely manner and the opinions given vary greatly depending on how familiar the person is with the genre and the writing craft.
In the last few years, people have come to advertise themselves as Beta Readers for a fee. Those with writing and/or publishing experience offer a number of services besides Beta Reading such as proofreading and editing.
After some research, I chose the read-for-a-fee option. I wanted to take advantage of the readers’ experience in the field and their ability to give me feedback not only on how the book reads, but also how it stands in the field as a sci fi novel.
My research came up with several Beta Readers from the Good Reads Beta Readers group. Some of them had their own site with information about their services. A few used Fiver as their business platform. From this group, I selected three Beta Readers.
The fees of many of the Beta Readers I researched were similar. Some charged by the word while others charged a flat fee for a given number of words. My book comes in at around 90k words and the fees were from $100 to $120.
They all had similar time frames, too. Two weeks to read and review a book of my length seemed common.
Most of the readers accepted various formats of the manuscript, with PDF and DOCx being most popular.
Because the holidays were coming up, I gave everyone until the end of January to get feedback to me.
Some of the blogs suggested having a list of questions to give the Beta Readers. I initially planned to do that, but after researching each of the readers, I decided against that. My statement to each of them was that I would forego the list of questions, deferring to their expertise. The most important thing to me was honesty. No sugar coating. They all responded positively to that and said that I could ask any questions after getting their feedback if they didn’t cover something.
I’ll let you know how this works when I start getting their reports in toward the end of January.