The Ideal Beta Reader

Today on Salad Bowl Saturday Susan Oleksiw shares her experience with what for her makes a Beta Reader ideal. I expect to see some comments, because I have a suspicion authors use Beta Readers for different purposes. We'll see if I'm right - happy reading. ~ Jim

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Some years ago my husband and I moved to a new town, and I found myself working on a nonfiction project in isolation. I sorely missed the conversations with my colleagues that had helped me through much of my work. I mentioned to my sister-in-law the problem I was having, and she asked a simple question. “Are you sure that assumption about X is correct?” I thought I was sure, but as I went forward I found her question opening my mind to a broader understanding, and that solved the problem I’d been grappling with. My sister-in-law served as a Beta reader.

Every writer needs at least one good second reader and those of us who have found such allies in our work know how important they are. I have several Beta readers whom I call on for different types of manuscripts. I’ve culled a few essential requirements from my Beta readers and my own role as Beta reader to give a sense of the ideal.

     1.     The Beta reader likes the writer’s basic style and approach, and has some interest in the topic or genre. I don’t read paranormal stories, so I wouldn’t be able to offer useful feedback, but I’m glad to read novels in most genres for my close colleagues. I know nothing about esoteric financial arrangements, so any comments I made might be worse than useless.

     2.     The Beta reader reads the entire book. She doesn’t quit in the middle because she has better things to do. She agrees this is an important task and if she offers to read, she finishes the manuscript. Getting feedback on the first half of a work isn’t really helpful.

     3.     If the Beta reader has professional expertise that is relevant to the story, she is willing to share it. I recently read a sweet Christmas story in which a doctor’s legal responsibility in certain cases should have been stated, but the writer had no way of knowing about this legal issue. I described the problem and left the writer to decide how to handle it. In one of my own manuscripts, my Beta reader, an anthropologist, pointed out that my character had switched from thinking like a Hindu to thinking like a Christian.

     4.     The Beta reader’s job is to notice if the logic of a scene holds together, and not think up a better way to write the scene. I will sometimes comment that a certain character probably wouldn’t say something the author has written, but I wouldn’t do more than make a suggestion. I admit here that this is often the hardest part for me because the pieces I read are usually very good and stimulating, so I find myself thinking up all sorts of solutions.

I might also suggest moving a paragraph to an earlier page, but if I find I want to do something like that more than once, I stop. That’s not the job of the Beta reader and here is where I have to ask: Is the manuscript ready for an outside reader, or am I getting carried away with rewriting the story?

     5.     The Beta reader doesn’t do copy editing. However, if grammar is an issue, I underline the passage and note that it isn’t clear. We all fall asleep at the computer sometimes, and it’s better to find problems early. I don’t do this all through the piece because this is only a reminder to the writer to go through the work carefully on another read-through.

     6.     My Beta readers have been generous with positive comments, and I like to return the favor. I like to include one or more comments on what I enjoyed about the manuscript, what works and what appealed to me especially. Every writer needs encouragement but also each writer has strengths as well as weaknesses, and sometimes a writer needs to be told that she has done something especially well.

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Susan Oleksiw is the author of two series, the Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva (Last Call for Justice, 2012) and the Anita Ray series featuring Indian American photographer Anita Ray (For the Love of Parvati, May 2014). Visit www.susanoleksiw.com for additional books and an Anita Ray short story.