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@abigail-m Ooh, very cool! Just be careful not to rush into publishing; I speak from experience, lol. But that’s an awesome goal! 🙂
Thank you! I’m very excited to get it finished and published. XD I’ll be sending it to a small group of readers in March, so I’m looking forward to getting some more outside feedback! I’ve been editing on my own and haven’t gotten a whole lot of feedback on it since August, lol.
Speculative fiction author. Mythology nerd. Singer. Worldbuilding enthusiast.
That sounds awesome!
If you don’t mind, I have a question about sending writing off for feedback: how do you do it? Like where would I send it? How much do I send? I’ve looked it up, so I have the general idea, but I was wondering how other writers do it. Since I’m kinda new to the department of beta readers outside friends and family.@abigail-m It depends on what stage you’re at. While I was working on my second draft, I had two author friends I trust read it as I went and give feedback, so they got it in more-or-less one-chapter chunks.
This next round I’m doing is specifically sensitivity readers so I can get feedback on the chronic illness representation and make sure I wrote it well, so I enlisted the help of a couple of chronically-ill people I know and also a couple friends-of-friends who deal with chronic illnesses. I’ll be sending them the full draft.
After that I’ll do normal beta-reads, and I’m planning to send the first chapter to my street team (people who have specifically signed up to help review and promote my work) and choose my beta-readers based on who gives the most helpful feedback; that smaller group will get the whole draft. You don’t have to be as specific with your beta-readers, but I’ve had experience with betas who either never ended up getting to the book or didn’t provide the type of feedback I was looking for and I personally prefer to trim down to a group I’m confident in from the get-go. Also, letting your betas know up-front what you’re looking for will help. If you’re looking for feedback on structural-level issues, tell them. If you’re looking for general reader impressions, specify that. Know what you’re looking for and communicate that to your readers so that they can be as effective as they’d like to be.
I usually copy my current draft over to a Google doc and set the link permissions to “commenting/suggesting” so that I can send the link to my betas and they can leave comments as they go. They’ll also be able to “suggest” edits, if you have them working on the prose-level, but won’t be able to make any permanent changes to the document. You can either send one document to everyone or you can make individual documents for individual readers; each has its benefits and its drawbacks and I’ve done both in the past. I think the last time I went through this process with a novel I asked my betas which they would prefer and went based on that.
Speculative fiction author. Mythology nerd. Singer. Worldbuilding enthusiast.
Wow! All of this info is extremely helpful, I really appreciate it! I never thought about have specific readers for specific things (for me, I’ll probably need readers who have even deeper knowledge of Russia and natural medicines in nature and etc).
Thank you a thousand times over!
@abigail-m Happy to help! 🙂
Speculative fiction author. Mythology nerd. Singer. Worldbuilding enthusiast.
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Thank you! I’ve been working on The Apostle’s Sister since October 2020, though the idea for it was technically first presented to me in June 2020.
The Anointed is a companion to TAS, and I’ve actually only been working on that one for ten days now.
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@joy-caroline Wait. You’ve only been working on TAS since October? Dude, judging by your progress, I thought you’d been working on it for quite some time now. Wow!
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@gracie-j
Really? I’ve always thought my work on TAS was going unbearably slow. 😅
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@joy-caroline I dunno about that…you sure seem to be going pretty fast to me!
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@gracie-j
Thanks!
@kathleenramm, I’m not sure if I’m going to India or trad publish yet.
The pen is mightier than the sword, but in a duel, I'm taking the sword.
ekseaver.wordpress.comI’m exhausted by just reading all the goals you guys have –Â they’re great, absolutely go for them, friends, I’ll be cheering you all on ^.^
My goals for writing this year:
– Write short stories consistently, one for every season.
– Finish a novel
– Write more poetry, at least once a month.
– Publish more poetry
– Start a blog once this busy semester ends.Elen sÃla lúmenn' omentielvo
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