In addition to beefing up my website, adding things to it, and more, I decided to also beef up my community as well. I know many other authors have beta readers. These are people that want to see their favorite authors improve so they give first impressions feedback on a freshly completed work. As I spend less time on social media, and more time on my website and mailing list, I wanted to start making my own beta reading community.
Everyone needs an editor, of course. I’m no exception. I really do value editors and otherwise, including authenticity editors that collaborate with me as well as, ahem, beta readers.
I just did a test run with a small pool of beta readers and it went well! Everybody was able to leave comments and or suggestions on my work without any hassles or having to jump through a million hoops. We use Google Docs because Google Docs is accessible to screen readers and is platform agnostic. I tried Only Office and, sadly, it’s not as accessible as Google docs is. I know all my writing is going to feed some garbage AI, or LLM, Large Language Model, but, well, thanks to inaccessibility of other software platforms, I’m locked in.
All the same, it’s great, because my beta readers get to be the very first people that see whatever I want to publish. They get to discuss amongst each other, and a few of them have even asked for help with their own work, which is epic!
Learn about what beta readers get and join the beta reading crew if you’re interested in helping a writer you love grow!