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The term “beta readers” refers to people who read your novel before you publish it. They can be invaluable in helping you find problems in your fiction. That is, if you know how to use beta readers in the first place.

You see, most authors have a rather flawed idea of what a beta reader does. For many authors, a beta reader is someone who tells you whether your book is “good or bad”. If you don’t find that idea stupid, you really need to see my post on “good and bad” books.

Indeed, one reason why authors use beta readers is simply to get an advanced rating or review. That’s fine – as you’ll see later, getting advanced reviews for my fiction is basically the only reason I’ve personally used beta readers – but that’s not what a beta reader is there for.

In today’s post we’ll take a look at how to use beta readers skillfully. That is, how to use a beta reader to actually identify problem areas and fix them, rather than just hear “I liked it!” or get a 5-star review.

Do You Actually Need a Beta Reader?

The whole idea of a beta reader relies on a single element. It’s a very simple element to express, but very complex to reflect on:

“Do I care about audience reception?”

In other words, do you write for your audience, or for yourself? Do you want to make money selling books, or do you want to be an intellectually free writer and express what’s burning inside you, without caring whether you offend someone, whether your style is “suitable” (whatever the fuck that means), or whether your possible readers will give you stellar reviews.

For most of us, the whole thing is a frail balance somewhere in the middle. I generally disregard my audience and write only what I want. But that’s an entirely subjective position. You might be different, and that’s fine.

The thing is, using beta readers is directly connected with your priorities, as I described above.

Beta Readers Are a Scaled Representation of Your Audience

That is to say, if you don’t care about your audience – how they will interpret and understand your novel, how they will rate it, etc. – then you have little to gain from using beta readers.

In this scenario, a beta reader is basically only an amateur proofreader; they might catch a typo or other error that so far went undetected.

It might not surprise you to hear that I actually don’t use beta readers; at least, not for the purposes a beta reader should be used (and which we will see in just a moment). I’ve used beta readers for marketing purposes, that is, in order to get some early reviews.

But if you do care about audience reception, and if you do care about sales, learning how to use beta readers can be crucial.

Let’s see how to do it skillfully.

The Tricks of Using a Beta Reader

The term “using a beta reader” sounds a bit off to me. It connotes someone chained in a dungeon, condemned to give feedback for all eternity!

In actual fact, the key in getting the best out of your relationship with your beta readers is precisely this: See it as a relationship.

In other words, beta readers should be people that you trust. Now, “trust” might mean different things to different people, but for our purposes trust refers to:

• having faith in the person’s ability to understand your book
• relying on their integrity to criticize it

One could find other aspects of trust in there, but these two are the most important ones in this context. Let’s take a look at both of them.

A Beta Reader Should Be Able to Understand Your Book

This is self-evident. If your reader can’t understand your book – its genre, its purpose, its place in the wider context of your work at large – then they can’t help you.

Imagine if you’re writing a crime-fiction novel but the beta reader thinks you’re a romance writer. All their advice would be actually misleading instead of helping you.

Remember that beta readers should be a representative sample of your intended audience. They should be able to give you clues as to whether your narrative works for that intended audience. And this is something only a good author-beta reader relationship can provide.

A Beta Reader Should be Able to Criticize Your Book

The only way you can be helped by your beta readers is if they can actually voice their concerns. Again, only a good relationship can provide this.

Put simply, your beta readers must have the integrity (and familiarity) to tell you if you’re messing up.

Needless to say, it’s up to you to decide whether they’re “right” or “wrong”; whether their concerns are justified (and you should address them) or unjustified (and you can safely ignore them).

Once again I must stress this: The above are meaningful only if you care about audience reception. The closer you are to writing only for the art and yourself, the less important anyone’s opinion is.

The problem is, of course, in finding the sweet spot.

How to Implement Beta Readers’ Advice

In other words, if you do care about audience reception and your beta reader tells you “your characters are not realistic”, or “your irony is not gonna be understood“, then what do you do?

The two extremes would be i) entirely ignore the beta reader; ii) rush to implement the suggestion of the beta reader in its entirety.

Unless you’re writing only for yourselfStill then, a beta reader might offer you an idea to better express what you intended all along. You would be a fool not to implement it!, i) is not suitable. So, the problem is to find the balance; the sweet spot.

Obviously enough, this comes with experience and confidence. You learn when to listen and when to ignore. And when you listen, you know how much to listen.

The specifics will depend on your personal circumstances. Still, the following might give you a direction.

• Identify the problem. If your beta reader has voiced a concern, this might or might not be an actual problem.
• Decide whether the beta reader’s observation would be representative of the intended audience. Again, experience dealing with your own genre and audience will let you know whether, say, a beta reader’s comment on the ending being predictable is a problem or not.
• Balance your priorities. Sometimes you might not want to “fix” something, even if you believe your intended audience will be bothered, because you strongly believe in your own implementation.

The last part in particular is the key takeaway. Not all “mistakes” must be fixed, even if you’re writing for an audience (i.e. with sales in mind). The audience shouldn’t always get what they want. If that were the case, literature would still be in the state it was in the Dark Ages.

Nature – through evolution and natural selection – works with “mistakes”; mutations that disrupt the “normal” (and unbearably boring) flow of things to produce something new and exciting.

Literature should be the same!