After a scheduled visit to the dentist on Labor Day morning (!) and some shopping, including a visit to The Happy Book Stack, an excellent new bookstore in the next city over, Pleasant Grove, I had several hours yesterday to dig into my last beta reader’s responses to my novel. She gave me three pages of general notes in a Word doc and marked up the manuscript with lots of little stuff. As I began to process her notes, I pondered what I thought was my emotional response to detailed criticism, but turned out to be something else.
Greek Letters
If you’re new to authorspeak, a beta reader reads a nearly final version of a book and notes, usually, things like this general list I’ve been giving my beta readers:
- boring parts
- confusing parts
- things that bump the reader out of the story
- things the story doesn’t need to do because it already did them
- anything that works especially well
Beta reading isn’t editing so much as reporting the reading experience, overall and in specific moments.
Given that beta readers exist, it follows (from the Greek alphabet, as in alpha + beta) that there should be such a thing as alpha readers. They read much earlier versions of a manuscript and give notes. I had a particularly fine one for my novel. Without her it might never see the light of day. Conventional wisdom has it that one’s first novel manuscript should only see the inside of a drawer, but this one’s going out there.
I’ve never heard of gamma readers. They’d come after beta. Maybe we just call them readers.
This Manuscript Is a Protobook
I did something unusual with this last beta reading. I’m trying to fine-tune some things in the interior design of the book in particular (welcome to self-publishing), and print-on-demand has become delightfully easy, so I uploaded my draft cover and the interior (the actual text plus front matter and back matter) to Amazon and got a proof copy for myself and another for my beta reader.
Ordinarily, she would work with a Word doc of the manuscript or perhaps a printout, but this way she was actually marking up a printed book. That makes her squeamish, so I told her it’s not a book yet. It’s a protobook, created to be written in. It would have feelings of futility if it weren’t.
Except for a gray banner proclaiming “Not for Resale,” the protobook’s front cover looks like this:
Yesterday afternoon I read her general notes, then reread them, then thought about them a while and made some notes of my own. Then I dove into the marked-up protobook (hereafter manuscript). In the available time, I got through the first hundred pages or so.
She left all sorts of notes, ranging from a few crossed-out words and paragraphs (suggested cuts are welcome) or a note that maybe teens wouldn’t say that, to little hearts or “LOL” in the margin, with the obvious meanings. She added some general thoughts at the end of some chapters.
I’ll have questions for her soon, including this one: Her comment at three points in a certain scene was “cringe.” I’ll need to ask: is this cringe at the writer level (I can’t believe he’d write that) or the character level (these teens are so cringe)? The former is probably bad. The latter could be authentic. Or not. I’ll ask.
As I work through her markup, I make notes of things to change or consider further in my own copy, where I’ve been working on other things. I note my immediate thoughts about things to tweak or at least consider, based on her notes. Some notes I consider and dismiss; this is a key principle of beta reading. The author is the author. It’s the author’s job to identify wheat and chaff, process the former, and blow away the latter.
I Gave Me Pause
Perhaps no one really enjoys systematic criticism, but writers mostly get used to it. We want to be better writers, produce better stories. So we have critique groups, alpha readers, beta readers, and such. I was genuinely eager to dive into all this yesterday, and I’m eager to get back to it.
Here’s what gave me pause—literally. I’ve grown accustomed over the past eight years or so to having my fiction critiqued by other writers, all of whom know that only candor is helpful. But yesterday I still had to stop after every chapter or two and take a break before continuing. At first this disappointed me; shouldn’t I be better at this by now?
Then I realized something. I wasn’t angry or sad or devastated. I wasn’t recoiling from her notes.
I kept at it, including the breaks, and I eventually realized why I had to keep stopping. I had to order my own thoughts about what to do or not with certain aspects of the story (or just the chapter, scene, or paragraph), to make room for more of her notes in the hopper, er, my mind.
Some of her notes give me ideas, you see, which I must clarify enough to jot them down while I have them. Some require more than a little thought about structure, themes, pacing, audience, etc.
So I am better at it by now. Happy thought.
November Is Coming
I’m eager to get through this and start the actual final revision. This beta reader’s insights have already prompted two sorts of changes which will certainly improve the tale: changing an important minor character’s voice and giving a certain aspect of my point-of-view (POV) character more of a role.
. . . All of which is tentative until I’ve seen and thought through all her notes and attempted to make my chosen changes work.
I don’t have forever. I’ve promised a November release. I haven’t pinned down the exact day of November yet.
So stay tuned. Maybe there will be a launch party. Maybe it will be on my birthday. Maybe it will be in person. Maybe, for good or ill, it will be virtual and therefore zero-calorie.
Pencil drawing by ChatGPT. And the author doesn’t look like that.
