What is a beta reader?

A beta reader is like a beta tester or a trial reader for your story. Before your manuscript is published, a beta reader will read your story and provide a report about their thoughts regarding what worked and what didn’t. It’s a lot more subjective than developmental editing since it’s from a reader’s perspective, but it’s certainly more budget conscious.

Free beta readers vs paid

Finding beta readers for free is an option! You can put out feelers on subreddits such as r/DestructiveReaders or r/BetaReaders, or you can find critique groups online. The downside is that the quality of the feedback may vary widely and ghosting is extremely common, especially for full, novel-length manuscripts. Finding a stranger—or a handful of them—to dedicate so much of their free time to both read your story and provide feedback can be a difficult, time-consuming task. Many authors turn to paid beta readers to eliminate that level of uncertainty and get feedback from someone with experience.

What you can expect from me

I provide inline comments via Track Changes in Microsoft Word to tackle issues, concerns, or praises within the manuscript as well as showing my live reactions to the events of the story. After I finish reading, I write a report that covers feedback on a macro scale for topics as needed such as character development, motivation, pacing, genre, plot, and consistency. I don’t cover spelling and grammar when I beta read, though I might note some egregious errors if it’s a quick fix.