He Said:
The question put to us is: How many beta readers are enough before you publish?
To answer this, I first have to define where I put beta reading in the editing process. For me, there are three steps in getting your book ready to publish. The first two, proofing and beta reading, can be interchanged (time wise) and are often combined into one. The third is editing.
Proofing consists of looking for grammatical, spelling, sentence structure and punctuation errors. Beta reading is typically more concerned with the story line and characters. Beta readers look to see if your story is appealing, well told, characters well developed, locations, objects, and actions described to create the images you intended. In short, it is completely subjective and intended to let the author know if their story reads as they hoped it would. As mentioned above, quite often beta reading covers both proofing and traditional beta reading.
So, how many beta readers are enough before you publish? That depends on what you expect from them and their capabilities. In my opinion, if I’m looking for errors, it is impossible for me to engage in the story. Likewise, if I’m caught up in the story, I easily overlook errors. Thus, if you’re looking for your beta read to do both, I suggest you have people who nitpick for every I dotted and T crossed and people who read for story only.
How many of each? That’s up to you. How many do you need to feel comfortable that all of the errors have been found? Remember, each beta reader is a second set of eyes, looking for the things you’ll miss because you wrote it and see what you wanted to be there; not what is really there.
A second point is, how much do you trust each of them to tell you what they really think or find. This is especially true if your beta readers are friends. If they are friends, you need more. You need a variety of opinions and views, which hopefully will flush out how your book is received overall.
Oops. One last point. Whether you have separate proofing and beta reads or combine them, they are not the final step before publishing. The final step is editing. And, it is the most critical. It’s the final review of your story, characters, and hunt for errors. And should be done only after the first two so it’s not bogged down in dealing obvious issues. It’s the icing on your story that makes is error free, wonderfully written, appealing and pulls the reader in. But, that’s the subject for another post!
Okay, Ash. You’re up!
She said…
Thanks, Bob! I will start by saying that as I’m not YET a writer, my view on this topic only comes from my experience as an editor for a small spell. But, I tried to do a little research on the subject before I decided to answer this and the answers are all over the place so I’ll go with my blended opinion.
So like Bob pointed out, beta reading is something that is done prior to sending your manuscript to an editor. It is used to look for a variety of things such as small proofing type mistakes and whether your story works. But who is to say whether your story works or not? I mean, any more than you can say yourself.
The plan I intend on using when my manuscript is ready is to pick an odd number of beta readers so that the opinions don’t end in a tie. I mean if you use four readers, two could think the same way, whereas the other two could think the opposite way. Yeah, I guess it’s self-explanatory.
I’d like to use a couple of friends, but not too many because I think they’d have a harder time telling me the truth, or they think like me enough that they can’t be objective. Having said that, I trust my friends enough to know that a lot of them are truly honest enough that they’d be the first to tell me how horrible it is.
I then would like a couple of people who I know to be pretty picky as far as grammar and such goes. No, I don’t expect them to have a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style tucked in their knapsack, but knowledge of how sentences should be structured and the like would be helpful. In my case, I’d like to use my connection with a large group of reviewers who are sensitive to that type of thing as they’d be quick to point it out.
I also want beta readers who like the genre I am writing, which would I suppose be considered contemporary fiction. The last thing I’d want is to have a handful of beta readers who enjoy only thrillers or the horror genre. I’d like readers who are familiar with the type of work I’ve written.
So you see, there are a million things I feel you should look for when picking beta readers; however, I still don’t think that answers the question, how many? Maybe the answer is a few from each criterion so that all bases are covered. But again, as I’ve not completed a book as of yet, I’m not real sure.
Not sure if any of this helps, but I’ll leave you with the suggestion to network with other authors and people involved in the business and ask questions like this. Who knows, some of those same people might end up as great options for beta readers.
Thanks to Tay LaRoi for the topic. If you have a topic you’d like to see discussed on HSSS, please email us.