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Finding reliable readers: Advice given and requested

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josephlcallahan

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Dear Writers:

Several people said they were willing to read pages and give me feedback. It didn't happen. In one case, I gave a writer feedback and I thought we were exchanging. It never happened.

So, a little advice giving and advice asking.

No matter how smart or experience someone is, if you don't know them well, don't trust they will reply or give you feedback.

I have a coworker who read my material, and she's a great reader AND writer, and I had an editor friend I hired to read the whole novel. She was fabulous.

Any advice on finding readers is welcome.

Peace,
Joe Tex
 

mrsmig

Write. Write. Writey Write Write.
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Hi Joe.

There's a subforum here called Share Your Work, in which you can post chapters for feedback. You won't be able to start your own thread there until you've racked up 50+ substantive posts. Meantime, I suggest you head over to the New Members forum and introduce yourself. You'll get a proper welcome and a number of links that will help you navigate this site. Read and engage in the conversation, and you'll have those 50 posts in no time.

If you're in a tearing hurry to get some feedback, there are two places you can post for crit now. One is the Post Your First Three Sentences game (be sure to read the first page for the rules). The other is the genre-specific Hook Me In Your First 200 Words game. Look in the SYW subforum for the genre you write in, and see if there's a Hook Me thread there.

And welcome to AW!
 

cmtruesd

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The best advice I can give you is to get involved in the community here. Whenever I'm looking to beta swap, I tend to look for people who are long-term users (usually 150+ posts). This shows me that they're not just flying in here to get a beta reader then flying back out. It also shows me that they have some experience participating in the forum as well as possibly critiquing in SYW. If people have shown dedication to the forum, they're more likely to show dedication as a beta reader.

Hope this helps!
 

Qwest

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Yip. It's tough out there for finding reliable Critique Partners and Beta readers. This forum is great for getting your work critiqued, the folk here are very generous.

I think you need to be clear about what you want when you find someone, send out a test first: share the first 30 - 50 pages first, that's pretty standard. If people don't listen and send the whole book, that's a bad sign: they don't read carefully. It's also important to share the first 50 to see if you're on the same page in terms of critique styles and if you enjoy each other's writing. There are tons of published books I don't enjoy, I'm not the best reader for them. And visa versa. I find if I don't get someone's work, very good chance they won't get mine.

Just as an aside, my personal thoughts: always be polite and kind. People are sharing their work, and even if you don't appreciate their style or genre, there are better ways to say it than "this sucks." Remember it's all subjective. Some people love "One Hundred Years of Solitude" other people loathe it. Your work isn't going to appeal to everyone and visa versa.

Good luck!
 
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