📢Why You Shouldn't Believe Your Beta Readers (trust me on this!)

This week I’ve been celebrating because it was my birthday yesterday but also — much more importantly! — because my editor let me know that my edits on book 2, The Village, are officially accepted.

It’s a huge relief because I’ve read about authors getting stuck in an endless loop of revisions. This official acceptance also triggers the next pay-out of my advance, woohoo (guess who’s going on the tear in her favourite bookshop this weekend??) 🎉

And I guess it means that the new, darker sections I added are staying in, eek… I think I’m going to have to warn my more sensitive relatives not to read it! 🫣

Okay, enough about me. Here’s what we’ve got in today’s newsletter:

1. New agent at Storm Literary is looking to sign clients!

2. Why you shouldn’t believe your beta readers (trust me on this one)

But first…

✨Subscriber Corner!✨

Huge congratulations are in order for the talented writer Diane Roth, who is a subscriber and great supporter of this newsletter. This week, her very first humour piece was published by The Belladonna Comedy, a publication on Medium.

I adored the piece. It’s just my type of thing: a brilliantly captured funny female voice, and a really clever structure. It’s a must-read: check it out here!

Note: if any other subscribers have had recent writing successes, please send me details so I can spread the word

Co-host (with agent Lauren Khan) of the Prose Pros literary podcast Tali Shammas has joined Storm Literary Agency as an associate agent and is now open to queries. 🎉

Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I’m a big believer in querying new agents (because of my own brilliant experience with former agent Kesia Lupo), so if you’re seeking representation… run! Go query Tali ASAP!

Tali is a former corporate lawyer so you can be sure she has a killer work ethic and will be a skilled negotiator and strong on contracts. You might already have read the excellent Q&A that fellow Storm agent @jennasatterthwaite did with Tali this week. If not, I highly recommend you check it out here .

What’s Tali looking for?

According to manuscriptwishlist.com, Tali is drawn to:

• Commercial hooks, lyrical writing, and voice-y characters who jump off the page and pull you in

• Books that explore underrepresented folk stories and mythologies

• Non-Western settings

• In fantasy, she adores a unique magic system

• She is also a big fan of books about books

You can find more specific details of what she’s looking for here.

Best of luck to Tali and all those who query her!

First off, what do I mean by a beta reader? I suppose technically a beta reader is someone who reads a draft of your manuscript after you’ve reworked it based on feedback from an alpha reader, the first reader of a messy draft.

But for the purposes of this post, when I use the term beta readers, I mean it to encapsulate:

• Fellow writing group members

• Critique partners

• Early readers you may, for example, have been matched with through a beta reader-matching service

• Friends and family who are foolhardy brave enough to give you feedback

In other words, writers and readers who are kind enough to take a look, often for free or because you’re reciprocating the favour, at your unpublished manuscript.

Before I go on, I should say that I’ve been in the same writing group for TWENTY YEARS and joining it is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I wouldn’t have gotten published without it and I’ve made some true ride-or-die friends.

You definitely DO need to get feedback along the way in order to improve on your early attempts.

In fact, there are many advantages to having beta readers/a writing group:

• Interacting with other writers is vital - you can encourage each other and moan about share insights into the publishing industry

• It’s useful to get feedback — careful beta readers will pick up on things like plot holes, inconsistencies, glaring errors, elements that are confusing or don’t make sense etc

• Writing is isolating, so the social aspect of it can be really enriching

• In a writing group, there’s a useful ‘wisdom of crowds’ element to it. For example, if most of the members of your group are having a pretty similar reaction to a chapter (like they’re lukewarm about it, or they love it) it’s probably worth taking this reaction on board

All of these things are particularly useful at the early stages of becoming a writer. It’s very easy to give in to those inner doubts and throw the towel in (it’s harder to walk away after you’ve committed a decade of your life to your quest for publication!), so having cheerleaders is extremely helpful, people who will:

• assure you that your work has potential

• convince you not to feel guilty about the state of your house

• agree that being a writer is the only sane response to an an insane world

• hound you into PERSISTING!

Every non-writer in your life will at some point get exasperated with your self-inflicted obsession with getting published, so it really helps to have writing friends who are similarly delusional committed.

HOWEVER! (Brace yourself for some tough love…)

There are three major problems.

Problem #1: your beta readers are sugar-coating it, honey!

If a beta reader is too brutal, too honest, they could destroy an early-stage (and middle-stage and late-stage 🤣) writer’s confidence.

The job of a beta reader is to encourage the writer and point out the strengths of their manuscript, while also highlighting the problems (as they see them, and herein lies another issue — see problems #2 and #3 below).

You have to cushion the blow.

It’s not being disingenuous or deceitful. It’s balancing encouragement with constructive criticism.

It’s giving the writer a confidence boost while drawing attention to areas where they might be going off-course.

And I believe it’s important that beta readers aren’t too brutal, because writing is a mental game just as much as tennis or golf.

As a critique partner or beta reader, you do not want to be responsible for giving someone the writing yips or the creative collywobbles. Aka the dreaded writer’s block.

Most early stage manuscripts by most early stage writers are not of publishable quality. That’s just part of the process. It doesn’t mean those writers should quit. It doesn’t mean they can’t get there eventually. But if a beta reader is too brutally honest about the flaws of a manuscript, the writer may quit before they get there.

It’s also much easier, psychologically, to absorb criticism if it’s sandwiched between positive feedback.

There comes a point, however, when a writer has moved from fledgling to more experienced, when they’ve learned, improved, rewritten, honed, polished, when they’ve done as much as they possibly can with a manuscript and feel it’s ready to start submitting to agents that the beta reader system starts to derail.

Problem #2: your beta readers, even if they are writers, even if they are published, will almost certainly lack market insight.

Unless your beta reader has worked in the publishing industry, they’re very unlikely to approach your manuscript with the mindset of an agent or editor.

Publishing is where art meets commerce, so the gatekeepers in that industry have no choice but to keep the market in mind: what will sell?

As a result, they’re on the hunt for that irresistible pull, a story that hits them like an emotional slap across the face from the get-go (if it doesn’t, you’ll get those dreaded ‘too quiet’ rejections), that feels like dipping their face into a stream where the current is already coursing along under the surface.

Beautiful writing is not enough.

They want assured, skilled storytelling.

And they want a HOOK, people! And they want you to then deliver on that hook.

They receive hundreds, maybe thousands, of manuscripts each year.

The competition is savage.

A good effort isn’t enough.

Your book has to be irresistible.

These are not usually the criteria that beta readers apply to a manuscript.

Problem #3: beta readers are not always skilled at diagnosing CORE problems

Most people think they can identify what’s wrong with a novel.

They’ll talk about uneven pacing and saggy middles and rushed endings and plot insistencies and grammar issues. And yes, those things will detract from a novel.

But most people (including writers) are not trained in how to open the bonnet of a book and diagnose the big-picture, potentially fatal problems, such as:

• Lack of tension

• Lack of inner conflict

• Lack of internal transformation

• Lack of any central ‘point’ (read craft books by Lisa Cron and @jennienash for help on this one)

• Lack of characters we care about (we don’t have to like them, but we do have to care)

• Lack of dilemmas

• Lack of a desire line i.e. the characters don’t care about/desire anything strongly enough (the reader will only care about something to the extent that the character cares about it)

• Lack of propulsion/narrative drive

• Lack of causality

• Lack of stakes

• Lack of a hook (if you’re writing commercial fiction)

• Lack of timeliness/an original take (again, for commercial fiction)

And out of all of those, the main killer of books is a lack of tension.

Your book has to be thrumming with tension throughout.

And most readers aren’t on the lookout for this.

So it’s not that writing groups and beta readers aren’t helpful. They can be extremely helpful, especially if the other writers in the group are more experienced than you.

It’s that their feedback can give aspiring authors an out-of-whack sense of whether or not their manuscript is likely to get snapped up by agents/editors.

If your beta reader’s verdict is at odds with the feedback you’re getting from agents/editors and you don’t know who’s right… I hate to break it to you but: the agents and editors are right.

Because they’re the gatekeepers! They’re the ones who decide whether or not to open those gates and let you in!

So their opinions are the only ones that really matter (in the context of getting traditionally published).

They’re the people you need to impress, not your beta readers.

👇Try THIS instead of over-relying on beta readers👇

If you ask your beta readers and writing groups for answers as to why you’re getting rejected, what tends to happen is that (out of camaraderie and kindness), they’ll try to buoy your spirits and say that the agents/editors have made a huge mistake by not signing you on the spot, and will one day bitterly regret this terrible decision.

It’s tempting to believe this comforting conclusion.

Here’s what I think you should do instead (assuming that you’ve already made your MS as strong as you possibly can):

• Make a short list of your dream literary agencies and your dream publishing imprints

• Then find one person who used to work at one of those agencies/imprints and who is now freelance (try Reedsy?)

• See if you can hire that person to read your query package

• Ask them to tell you what their reaction would be if this had landed on their desk while they were still working in your dream agency/imprint

• Ask them to brutally honest. Say this: am I barking up the wrong tree with this project? If you can get the truth, and take it on the chin, it will be gold dust!

• If they wouldn’t have signed you/your book, ask them to explain why (tell them you’re thick skinned and can handle the truth)

• Ask them what they think you should do

• Ask them what agents they think you should query/would be a good fit

This is what I did and it gave me the confidence to push on with my novel which did — in the end! — get published.

Okay, gotta run as one of my children is determined to paint a mural on our garden wall so I better go check what exactly is going on out there… it’s gone too quiet, I’m worried 🤣

Keep writing!

Caroline x