In developing my “eight-year plan” to become a successful writer, I had to take stock of my strengths and opportunities. Part of that is thinking of who the other stakeholders are. The one group that I’ve neglected too much so far in my journey are readers.
Now, keep in mind that I’ve only been published in the following categories:
- Non-fiction book-length works
- Newspaper articles
- Academic journals
- Small regional literary journals.
As such, most of my critiques have come from Writers Groups and editors.
While I’m not entirely sure how this “should work,” and I’m kinda making it up as I go along, I realize I need a diverse group of early readers to give me feedback. So, I reached out to my network of friends and asked for volunteers. I have seven.
I printed copies of the book and then bound them using fasteners and tape. (To get them close to form, but a little larger for comments and markings, I cut 8.5″ x 11″ sheets in half, used a two-hole punch in two places along the 8.5″ side, and “stitched them” with two-prong fasteners. I sealed the spine with book tape. The result was these prototype copies for beta readers, which are going out today:
I asked my Beta readers (I think they’re technically Alpha reader since they’re first, but I like the sound of Beta better) to mainly read for enjoyment and use a series of checks and x’s to flag:
- like, love, makes the story
and
- don’t like, confuses me, and offends me.
Any other commentary, I’ll consider bonus.
I’m looking forward to the feedback from these readers…and I’m coming to grips with the fact that your first draft is a tiny fraction of your novel’s journey toward publication. While I cranked out this draft in the month of November, I really don’t expect to start trying to get it in front of agents until mid-2020 at the soonest…and I feel like that’s aggressive.
