Beta Readers: Who They Are, What They Do

Beta reader at work!

The process of writing a book manuscript can be exhausting and confusing, especially for novice writers. They might ask themselves every day, “Is my writing any good?” Does the plot/storyline make sense?” “Does my book fulfill the promise I made to the reader?” “Are my characters likeable and fully formed?” (This applies to memoir, as well.).

If you want answers to these questions before you publish, beta readers can be helpful in improving the overall quality of your manuscript by offering focused feedback about the elements of your writing.

How to avoid the wrong beta reader

The purpose of a beta reader is often a point of contention between writers and editors. Most newbie writers want to have their writing reviewed by people in their lives, people they are comfortable sharing their writing with: family members, friends, coworkers. This is a bad idea, for several reasons.

First, folks who know you will generally want to be kind, supportive, and encouraging, especially family and friends. They know how hard you’ve worked, how much time you’ve put into your writing, and how much this book means to you. So you will have their backing 100 percent, no matter what.

Second, a beta reader should be—really, must be—an avid book reader; someone who spends a lot of time following storylines, getting to know characters, enjoying good dialogue, and appreciating atmosphere, description, and setting. In other words, wallowing in the elements of a good book. A beta reader who doesn’t read books on a regular basis isn’t ideal.

Third, beta readers should always be given a checklist of questions about those elements of your manuscript that they will evaluate as they read. Asking someone to read your manuscript and comment openly about anything and everything will not yield useful information. Beta reader feedback is most helpful when each reader answers the same specific questions about different aspects of your writing. The ability to compare and contrast feedback is essential to learn how to improve your manuscript.

Tips for choosing the right beta reader

Since I’ve told you who you don’t want to ask to read your manuscript and what mistakes to avoid, it leads naturally into a review of how to select the best beta readers and get the most helpful feedback.

Your beta readers should be people who don’t know you intimately, and total strangers are a good option. These people are much more likely to be honest in their critique. Additionally, people who don’t know your story (particularly in the case of a memoir) will not know anything about you and your situation other than what you share in the manuscript. They can’t “fill in the blanks” because all they know is what they’ve read. If the story is missing key information or if characters—especially you, in the case of memoir—are under-developed, someone who doesn’t know you will spot this immediately.

A beta reader who has some exposure to the genre who’ve written for is a plus. If you’ve written a memoir, the beta reader ideally has read other memoirs. If it’s self-help, they should have experience reading books of that kind. I don’t work with fiction, but obviously, if you’ve written a sci-fi or fantasy manuscript, a romance, a mystery, or a thriller, it’s a good idea to have beta readers who are familiar with those specific genres.

A feedback checklist

The primary way to get the most meaningful feedback from your beta readers is to provide them with a checklist of questions to answer. This doesn’t have to be long or elaborate and plenty of good checklists already exist. To start, make sure your checklist asks these questions that apply to any nonfiction book or memoir:

• The Why: Is there a clearly stated purpose? Is the reason for writing the book obvious?

• The Who: Who is the ideal audience? Who is this book specifically written for? Is the language appropriate to that audience?

With fiction, your book is written for a particular genre. The Why is to produce a book people will want to buy, read to the end, and recommend. The Who, your audience, will include readers who have an affinity for that type of book or are just dipping a toe into the genre.

I want to reiterate an important point about memoir that I have made in other blog articles I’ve written: a memoir has more in common with a novel than with a nonfiction book. Why? Memoir is a subgenre of creative nonfiction—nonfiction because it is factual and creative because the structure is novel-like. Think Wild, Educated, Angela’s Ashes, The Glass Castle, The Year of Magical Thinking, or Eat, Pray, Love. These memoirs read like novels. For this reason, a beta reader feedback checklist for a novel often works well with a memoir.

I am not going to link you to any particular checklists. Many lovely people on the interweb have created wonderful such lists. To find them, do a Google search for any of the following:

• Beta reader checklist

• Beta reader questionnaire/beta reader questions

• Beta reader instructions

Find the one that best suits your manuscript, as some will be more appropriate than others. You can always add to and modify any list you choose.

Final thoughts

Feedback from beta readers can be extremely helpful in improving the focus, overall quality, and reader engagement of your manuscript. But each beta reader should be chosen carefully and given detailed instruction about their feedback if the process is to be truly useful.

Let me know what you think of this article. I appreciate your comments and suggestions.

~~Trish Lockard is a freelance editor and writing coach, specializing in nonfiction and memoir. Her business is Strike The Write Tone. She is the co-author, along with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism.

Sensitivity Readers: An Editing Specialty Comes of Age

We are a nation rich in diversity.

In June 2019, I posted an article to this blog called "Sensitivity Readers Are Not Censors." At that time, controversy was swirling around the role and appropriateness of the so-called sensitivity reader (SR). I had a hard time finding clear, positive discussions of what an SR was and what one does. Even the prestigious New York Times ran that article titled “In an Era of Online Outrage, Do Sensitivity Readers Result in Better Books, or Censorship?” by Alex Alter that was as unflattering as you could get about SRs.

This go-round, I will tell you what SRs actually do and why now, a mere year and a half later, the need for writers and publishers to employ SRs is the norm and not the exception.

SRs Aren’t Going Away

The Chicago Manual of Style weighed in on these issues in Section 5.254: Bias and the editor’s responsibility. It says in part:

A careful editor points out to authors any biased terms or approaches in the work (knowing, of course, that the bias may have been unintentional), suggests alternatives, and ensures that any biased language that is retained is retained by choice.

Conscious Language

Conscious language is a term coined by Conscious Style Guide founder Karen Yin. According to Yin, conscious language is the art of using words effectively in a specific context. Who is your audience? What tone and level of formality do you want? What are you trying to achieve? Some words are more apt than others. The most important part of conscious language is the conscious part—our intention.

Conscious Style Guide described itself as:

…the first website devoted to conscious language. Our mission is to help writers and editors think critically about using language—including words, portrayals, framing, and representation—to empower instead of limit. In one place, you can access style guides covering terminology for various communities and find links to key articles debating usage. We study words so that they can become tools instead of unwitting weapons.

Yin’s website is replete with resources from scores of other websites (divided into sensitivity categories), a newsletter, blog, and, of course, the obligatory store.

What Sensitivity Readers Offer

Crystal Shelley is a full-time editor, proofreader and sensitivity reader who works as Rabbit with a Red Pen. In addition, Crystal is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW).

According to Crystal, authors, editors, and publishers employ sensitivity readers to accomplish four goals:

• Strengthen the story

• Identify potential harmful elements of the writing

• Assess the effectiveness of the language

• Evaluate biases

While the role of a sensitivity reader is most often associated with editing fiction, an SR’s specialty is applicable to all forms of writing, including blogs, memoirs, and long-form essays. Sensitivity readers strengthen writing by helping the writer with these elements:

• Character description

• Dialogue and character behaviors

• Cultural elements and settings

The role of an SR is to flag problems with language, but, most importantly, they will offer alternative language and depictions.

How can a sensitivity reader strengthen writing? An SR reads with the goal of rooting out language that is:

• Disrespectful

• Excluding

• Stigmatizing

• Presumptive

Writing that is devoid of harmful, derogatory, and disrespectful language builds trust; readers can see the author cared enough to do their homework.

Diversity Baseline Survey

Lee & Low Books released the first Diversity Baseline Survey 1.0 in 2015. Before the DBS, people suspected publishing had a diversity problem, but without hard numbers, the extent of that problem was anyone’s guess. The goal was to survey publishing houses and review journals to capture information about their employees, their publishing workforce, regarding these categories:

• Race

• Gender

• Sexual orientation

• Disability (chronic, physical, and mental illness)

The results of DBS 1.0 were shocking. The publishers' survey respondents were identified as:

• 79 percent White

• 78 percent women

• 88 percent straight

• 92 percent non-disabled

As readers had begun to demand to see themselves depicted in books, the publishing industry itself did not reflect the diversity of our country's populace.

The numbers provided by DBS 1.0 brought into sharp focus the need of publishers to place more books into the marketplace that represent our country's rich diversity, but initially, this effort was apparent only in the children's book market. Cultural events and political and social movements in the five years since the DBS 1.0 cannot be ignored by the industry.

Diversity in Publishing Matters

According to a Lee and Low blog article from January 2020, the book industry has the power to shape culture in big and small ways. The people behind the books serve as gatekeepers, who can make a huge difference in determining which stories are amplified and which are shut out. If the people who work in publishing are not a diverse group, how can diverse voices truly be represented in its books?

Are You Out of Step?

If you do not grasp the importance of diversity in writing, and the need to accurately and kindly represent people of different races, genders, orientation, and disabilities, you are out of step with the US publishing industry. One could argue you are out of step with humanity. If a discussion of sensitivity to “the other” in your writing doesn’t speak to your heart, I am reminded of a quote from Dr. Anthony Fauci:

I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care for other people.

Overwriting, the Death of Clarity

Since the start of 2020 I have been working as a contract editor and manuscript assessor for a memoir publisher in North Carolina. Besides loving the steady work and its associated income, I have worked on an amazing variety of memoirs: a man recalling one day on the lake fishing with his dad; a pioneer in women’s liberation and feminist psychotherapy reviewing her career; an adult victim of child abuse recounting the fear and pain he and his two brothers endured and where each is now; and the story of the only Jewish family in a small rural North Carolina town in the 1940s.

My eyes have been opened to the diversity and richness of the lives of those around us; a reminder that you never know what someone has been through simply by looking at them. And an understanding that how well or how poorly someone is doing in life is often the result of circumstances beyond their control.

I suppose I already knew this through my work with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). I am reminded almost daily to not be judgmental of the behavior of a cashier in the supermarket, the saleswoman at a department store, the glum bank teller, or someone in an elevator who is distance and aloof. I don’t know them, their work situation, or what happened to them at home last night or this morning. I just know that life isn’t always a bed of roses. There are families full of love, support, and good memories. And others full of pain, heartache, and regret. Or all of the above.

So, what does any of this have to do with Strike The Write Tone? Or my blog articles that I use to offer advice for writers? Not a damn thing. It’s just what was on my mind as I sat down to blog after a long absence. Let me try to offer editing guidance. Hmm, let me see.

Well, I posted on my Facebook business page at the end of 2019 that my word for 2020 is “Simplicity. No matter your genre, keep your writing as straightforward and to-the-point as possible. Write to communicate, not to impress. Keep it simple.” I also shared this quote.

I had just done a couple of manuscript assessments for newbie writers and this was heavy on my mind. I can recall during my college days, trying to sound as sophisticated and academic as possible when writing an essay or research paper. Everyday words and straightforward sentences were for life outside the classroom. I spent a lot of precious time perusing Roget’s Thesaurus for multi-syllabic versions of commonplace words and fashioning exquisite run-on sentences. When, if read aloud, my paper sounded like something an Oxford don would say, I knew I had succeeded. Sadly, my good grades reinforced this misguided belief.

The finest manuscripts I have edited and assessed this year are those that clearly and humanly register in my brain and my heart. This is not to say that a writer shouldn’t strive to create beauty with their words. I’m not advocating zero description or flat, colorless passages. But I have read some gloriously simple sentences that brought tears to my eyes; tears of sadness and tears of joy. I would love to share one or two, but I cannot. Yet. Let’s get the writers published, then I will.

What I’m talking about is known as overwriting.

Overwriting is a wordy writing style characterized by excessive detail, needless repetition, overwrought figures of speech, and/or convoluted sentence structures. (Thank you, Richard Nordquist).

Overwriting is the hallmark of a writer who is 1) untested, 2) untalented, 3) unedited, 4) egotistical, or 5) some combination of these. If you find yourself laboring and straining to construct a sentence, you might be overwriting.

OK, I know what you’re thinking—I’m saying writing should always be easy and effortless and flow out of you like water from a garden hose. No. That is not what I’m saying.

The truth is, writing is hard.

But not the kind of hard that has you re-working a run-on sentence for an hour trying to select the three most perfect adjectives to describe a cloud. In fact, writing is at its hardest when you are trying to convey an elemental thought or image. Simple beauty in a single sentence is more difficult to achieve than pages upon pages of overwrought passages. Keep it simple. I'll leave you with this:

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

~William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style

In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.