Posted by Wodke Hawkinson on Thursday, March 22, 2012 Under: Guest Posts
I know many people have written about
Beta readers, but I would like to tell you about my experience with
them. I don’t want anybody to be discouraged after reading this from
Beta reading. I have never had any family members as a Beta reader. They have all been friends or acquaintances.
I’m new to writing fiction and when I used my first Beta reader, it was
for my first novel (shelved for the time being.) That Beta reader was
knowledgeable and very kind. She corrected some punctuation and only
asked that one section be longer.
The next time I used Beta readers, 19 of them, was for my short story,
Rag Doll. That didn’t go as smoothly. It was originally written for a
contest and could not be more than 1500 words. The first Beta reader
made a few corrections and off it went to the contest. An author on
Twitter asked to read something I had written and I sent him Rag Doll.
He felt it should be expanded and published. I expanded it and sent it
to 19 Beta readers. All except two told me it still needed to be longer.
After I expanded it, I sent it to a friend to be proofread. To make a
long story short, no pun intended; the next people to read it told me it
still wasn’t ready for publication. I worked on it some more and then
posted it on my blog. It is what it is and for a while, I wished I’d
never written it. I have to laugh about this for many seem to like the
story.
I now have a wonderful writing coach, Scott Bury and he is the only
reason I continue to write today. He feels I have talent and can
lengthen another short story I wrote, Messages From Henry, into a
novella. I am struggling with it, but with Scott’s never ending
encouragement, I think it will be finished one day. You can read
chapters one through four on my blog.
Since I don’t publish my works, I won’t be using Beta readers for the
remainder of Messages From Henry. I will strictly make the changes Scott
Bury suggests and continue to post two chapters at a time on my blog.