How To Have a Good Beta Reading Experience
...OR: what I've learned from 5 years of beta reading
As voted for in the recent polls, here I will reposting (with updates/expansion) an old tumblr post that was quite popular!! As a writer who have written a total of 5 complete novels, four of which have gone through extensive critique and beta reading, I have had tons of experience with both beta reading others’ novels, and having my own critiqued and analyzed to hell and back.
This is mostly by and for writers, however readers can learn from this post as well!
Main Points:
Understanding Alpha vs. Beta Readers
Choosing Readers
Being Clear About Feedback
Swapping / Compensation
The Importance of Writing Community/Groups
Websites/Resources for Finding Beta Readers
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS ALL PERSONAL EXPERIENCE/OPINION
1. Understanding Alpha vs. Beta
Many times, especially new writers who had never had anyone read their work before, and have never sought out feedback (or sometimes even experienced writers) don’t understand the difference between a draft in its alpha stage vs. beta stage. Also, how you define alpha vs. beta depends on who you ask—which is part of the problem.
Here I’m breaking down my personal definition of Alpha vs. Beta, and I do believe this is generally the consensus among experienced writers, with a few added details from my personal taste.
In general:
Alpha Readers - for first/second drafts
Beta Readers - for polished drafts
It is ok for alpha reads to be unpolished and have grammar issues, and it's even ok if they have plot issues, continuity errors, etc. Alpha readers are there for that purpose: to be the first eyes on your story and help you find and fix those issues.
From a reader’s perspective, the issue I have had over the years is writers asking me for a beta reader when what they really needed was an alpha. I went in expecting a fairly-polished draft and got someone’s Draft 0. In some cases, I got 100k drafts where the writer obviously had no idea how to format dialogue grammar and every single dialogue was wrong. Obviously this made me slow and in many cases, unable to finish.
Alpha readers go in expecting it to be unpolished, and will be prepared to look past grammar errors and style concerns in order to focus on the Big Picture (plot holes, character consistency, pacing/engagement issues, etc). A beta may be too frustrated by an unpolished draft to finish it or provide the feedback you're looking for. If you have been experiencing a lot of betas backing out and not finishing your work, you might consider this as a possible reason why.
I would also recommend, if you have never had anyone read your work before, even if you have had multiple drafts, it might be safest to ask for alphas rather than betas.
A quick way to see if your work is beta-ready: Pick up a published book from the shelf in your genre. Does your book read similarly? Does your formatting & grammar look the same? Beta-ready novels should look and read like a finished novel, or nearly-finished.
Bonus: read it out loud! If reading the published book out loud is significantly easier than reading yours out loud, you're probably in the alpha stage.
2. Choosing Alphas/Betas: Good Faith Readers
You may not like it but: Just because someone is your friend, real life or online, does not mean they will make a good reader for you.
#1 MOST IMPORTANT: GET READERS WHO LIKE & REGULARLY READ YOUR GENRE!
I cannot stress this enough. As someone who writes vampire content, I cannot begin to express to you the amount of useless comments I got from readers who had clearly never read a vampire book in their life.
You need someone who is familiar with your genre and who likes your synopsis/blurb.
Caveat: that said, I did find a few great betas who had never read vampire content before and gave awesome feedback. However, these readers admitted they knew nothing about the paranormal genre, and because of that did not make any comments on worldbuilding, instead sticking to plot and character development only. Some readers can't make this distinction.
Another thing I would recommend, especially if you are swapping manuscripts with another writer, read their writing before having them beta read. If you read some of their work and see that it’s really unpolished or a style that’s vastly different than yours, that might change whether you want them to read for you.
I personally use an online form to do a quick survey to see who was interested in beta reading. This works really well for me and I would recommend it! You can also use this to make all potential readers agree to not share/distribute/plagiarize your work, so you have it in writing just in case someone were to try something. This was also a great way to see which genres they usually read and how many times they have beta read in the past.
This does not mean you can’t get inexperienced readers or readers who don’t normally consume your genre—what I’m getting at here is you need good faith readers. When you’re sharing your book for the first time, you need readers who want it to be successful, who want it to find its audience, who want to resonate with the story. You want them to see the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses. If they have experience writing or a fondness for your genre, that’s a bonus!
3. Be Clear About The Type of Feedback You Want
This is probably the most important thing, after choosing the readers themselves. Many readers will shy away from reading your work if you have nothing in mind for them to critique. Also, being clear about this shows that you 1) know it isn't perfect and needs work and 2) you have insight into what the issues already are.
For Alphas, these traits are what I have found to be the most helpful:
Immediate inline reactions - particularly emotional engagement and pointing out lines that resonated with them
NO grammar/stylistic comments (unless incomprehensible)
Questioning of worldbuilding, character decisions, and character development - particularly if confusing or unclear
Comments on action sequences & their readability
Comments on believability of the plot points/progression
For Betas, these are what have been most helpful to me:
Comments on grammar, especially if repetitive
Stylistic comments, particularly for over-used words or noticeably repetitive sentence structures
Comments on pacing
Comments on plot initiation point and buildup/execution of the climax
NOT questioning my worldbuilding/plot and trusting that what I have written is intentional. Only pointing out areas that have on-page evidence of inconsistencies.
Everything above is my personal preference. You might find other comments to be better for alphas/betas. However, being upfront about which comments you want or don't want can drastically change which people want to read for you!
Some readers are obsessed with in-depth inline grammar/style comments, some aren't at all. Some writers LOVE these in-depth grammar comments, and some don't. Being clear about what you want is the best way to make sure you and your readers are compatible for the stage of editing you're at.
4. Swapping / Compensation
So this one I might have a bit of an unpopular opinion. I guess that’s up to you to decide.
Based on my experience, swapping and compensation does not mean you're going to get better feedback or have a better experience or relationship with readers.
In general, for everyone who beta reads for me—and finishes—I always offer to read theirs, even if it’s a genre I don't like.
Personally, I have never paid for beta readers, and I just recently started offering paid services on Kofi. All of my personal experience as of right now has been either people offering to read for free, or swapping with other writers.
However, there are a few issues I've come across with swapping:
Mine was beta-ready and theirs was unpolished first draft
Our types of feedback didn’t align
Our genre preferences didn’t align
Their feedback was nowhere near as in-depth as mine
In these cases, one or both of us burnt out on reading the others’ work, and then we’d both bail. Especially with #4, it was very disheartening for me to spend hours finding their plot holes, helping them come up with ways to fix them, for them to then write 1 paragraph about what they thought of my story that was extremely surface level. To me, that wasn't even a swap, and was practically worthless. There was even one who got sensitive about the feedback I was providing (which was a queer sensitivity read) and then left almost identical comments on my story, which weren’t even relevant. It was like revenge-commenting.
All this to say: I have had positive experiences with swaps. I have had multiple swaps with writers who write completely separate genres who have become lifelong friends.
This goes back to #2 above: be picky & choose your readers well. Your story is your baby, and it deserves to be critiqued by people who value you and your story, and want to help you make it the best possible version of itself.
To summarize, I have had 3 good swapping experiences. I have had 10+ good uncompensated betas—with an offer for me to read their stuff when it’s ready. Do with that what you will.
5. Writing Community / Groups
On to a more positive note! I have had the best experience with tumblr’s writeblr community, and this is coming from someone who has tried multiple other communities (which I discuss in the last section below). Having my own discord server from tumblr, joining a few other writers’ discord servers, has completely changed the game regarding finding consistent betas, more resources, and just having an overall much more positive time writing and editing.
I do want to emphasize the importance of giving to get back. If no one is liking/interacting with your excerpts, tag/ask games, etc. then that's probably because you're not interacting with them! It's very important to show interest in other people's work!!
I have found ALL of my recent betas from my tumblr and discord groups. They have been lovely so far and I would highly recommend building up community there if you are interested in finding betas.
6. Websites/Resources for Finding Betas
Alright, last section. Thanks for bearing with me. I'm going to go through the sites I have used, and why I still use them, or why I dropped them.
Scribophile
So, for starters, this is one I don't use anymore. This was the site I first used when I had my first finished novel, AVOF, back in 2020. It was Draft 0 and I had no idea how beta reading or feedback worked.
Essentially, Scribo has a point-system. The more comments you make, the more points you get, and then when you have enough points, you can post a chapter. It continues in a cycle.
Pros:
Personally, I think the site helped me a lot in figuring out what a bad critique looks like (which is helpful!) and also helped me learn which comments/feedback types work for me, and which don't. I don't regret my time there by any means, and I found one lifelong friend and beta reader there I wouldn’t trade for the world. It also allows you to post/remove your story and the readers don’t have direct access to it—meaning if they want to download/steal/plagiarize, they’d have to copy and paste or screenshot chapter by chapter. It’s a little safety precaution.
Cons:
It’s not the best place to get constructive feedback. The issue with their system is it encourages quantity over quality. Because of that, you’ll get strangers rewriting your entire chapter in their own style so they get multiple points for one critique, but... was any of it actually helpful to you? Maybe, maybe not. It's also random, so you can't control who comments on your stuff, and they might just comment to get points even if they hate your genre. I also don’t think it’s fair to have to do 3-5 critiques in order to save up enough points to post ONE chapter of your own. And if you want to post your story for full beta reads and control who reads it and who doesn’t, you have to subscribe monthly.
So I keep an eye on it occasionally to look through their forums on writing, agents, publishing, etc. But most of the forums gets nasty, because there are a lot of really pretentious writers who think they know all the rules. If you join small groups (e.g. sub-groups based on diversity, etc) they tend to have better and more meaningful discussions.
Personally, I would never use it for beta/alpha/feedback ever again. This is the site where most of my bad swaps came from. But you might find it useful! So I thought I would share it.
Nanowrimo Forums
Well, obviously, this one is dead now. As far as I know, the forums have completely shut down permanently. I have fully deleted my account and no longer do anything affiliated with it. If you want a full breakdown of everything that happened, I recommend this tumblr.
I did find a few good beta readers here back in the day, but the issue with NaNo is that a lot, and I mean A LOT, of these participants are first-time writers and have no concept of what polished vs. unpolished even means. Also, a good chunk of them only write during November, not year round. So for finding consistent, year-long partners, this is not the best option.
NaNo is also officially pro-AI so… there’s that…
BetaBooks
I’ve used this in the past and it was pretty good! It’s set up that you can invite betas to your story specifically, or you can look through a beta reader library, read their profiles, and invite them to see if they’re interested.
This is essentially an alternative to Scribophile. It allows you to post your story online and find betas and become a beta.
Why I like it better than Scribophile: it’s not a point-based system, meaning it’s uncompensated so the readers have nothing to gain other than enjoying/helping your story. There’s no hard feelings if someone bails. It allows you to see all comments in one place (which Scrib can't do).
It also is all online, easily removable, so readers would have to copy/paste or screenshot chapter-by-chapter to steal it. So again, just a little safety net that makes me feel better.
The only issue is that you basically have to subscribe to use it other than for the bare basics. Overall I didn’t mind using it, however most readers prefer to read on word or google docs.
Writeblr
As stated above, I stand by tumblr (and associated discords) for being the best place to find readers! It does rely on your involvement with the community, though. Just hopping in and immediately asking for readers won’t get you far, tumblr is too wary of bots and sketchy accounts. You will have to actually introduce yourself and interact with other writers and their works to get anything in return—but this is a good thing because it means building community! I highly recommend it.
Ellipsus
This has been my newest way to get comments! It’s fairly new, and currently free, and designed for collaborative writing/co-writing. It definitely isn’t super ideal or perfect for beta reading (yet) but I enjoy its minimalist design, that it’s available anywhere online, and can allow you to have all readers in one “file” but they can keep their comments in separate “drafts.” I do hope that they keep growing their features to make it more critique/beta friendly, because it is a bit confusing to use it for that purpose currently (since that’s what it was designed for). Overall I’m enjoying it and I know they’ll continue to improve it! (Bonus: they’re staunchly anti-AI)
TL;DR / IN CONCLUSION:
Know where your book is in terms of reader-readiness. Know the difference between alphas/betas and polished/unpolished. Know the types of feedback that work for you and specifically request it when recruiting betas. Be upfront if you’re not sure about these things, and what you’re looking for!
Interact with a community. Give interaction in order to receive, and don't expect people to reblog/share/like your content if you don’t interact first. Join small, niche writing community discords. Find like-minded writers.
Decide to swap or not, but this won’t make or break you.
There are many writing communities out there designed to help you not only find betas, to provide feedback forms and commentary. Try them out and see what works best for you.
Peace out~
Congrats! You survived this longass post lol
Stay tuned for more discussion on beta reading and critique in the next newsletter!! If you want more posts and the expanded version of this newsletter, head over to patreon!
