Have you heard the term “beta reader”? If so, you might be wondering: what is a beta reader? Answer: Every author needs feedback from people who read their book BEFORE it’s published, and those people are called beta readers. (I guess the author is the alpha reader.) Why do you need beta readers? When you write a book mostly you know what you’re trying to say, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve actually said it, or that you’ve said it in a way that someone else can understand. When you read it back, you know what it means, because you wrote it, and you can never read it the way someone who doesn’t already know what it’s saying will read it. It’s quite possible that what you’ve written does not come across to your readers the way you thought it would. There is only one way to find out if you’ve said what you thought you said, and that’s to get someone (preferably several someones) to read it for you and give you feedback. This is what a beta reader does. They also give you … [Read more...]