The Care and Feeding of Beta Readers - 10/19/04 09:18 AM
Authors, how do you treat your betas? Or maybe I should ask betas how they want to be treated <g>
I'm getting to the point again where I'll need a BR, so I've been thinking about this lately. I want someone who's got the same general idea of the characters that I have, someone to keep my commas in line, someone to help me keep track of my plot, and mostly, someone to cheerlead for me I like to have several betas for each story, if I can. So, who do I choose? Well, there are the people I've worked well with before. But some of them are busy with other stories or traveling or changing continents or something silly like that If I know they're really busy I might not even bother asking if they've got the time to help me out. Betas put in a lot of their time for a story that doesn't even have their name under the title and I try to be appreciative of mine.
So, I'm thinking on the keyboard, so to speak... is there an established etiquette for treating beta readers? Betas, have you been abused? Authors, has a beta reader done you wrong? Any horror stories out there?
Try to keep it to generalities, though, without pointing any fingers. This isn't about getting back at anyone. In fact, we can just all assume that any bad examples involved FOLCs who've already left the fandom, so it couldn't possibly be any of us <g>
Make any sense? Discuss amongst yourselves!
PJ
I'm getting to the point again where I'll need a BR, so I've been thinking about this lately. I want someone who's got the same general idea of the characters that I have, someone to keep my commas in line, someone to help me keep track of my plot, and mostly, someone to cheerlead for me I like to have several betas for each story, if I can. So, who do I choose? Well, there are the people I've worked well with before. But some of them are busy with other stories or traveling or changing continents or something silly like that If I know they're really busy I might not even bother asking if they've got the time to help me out. Betas put in a lot of their time for a story that doesn't even have their name under the title and I try to be appreciative of mine.
So, I'm thinking on the keyboard, so to speak... is there an established etiquette for treating beta readers? Betas, have you been abused? Authors, has a beta reader done you wrong? Any horror stories out there?
Try to keep it to generalities, though, without pointing any fingers. This isn't about getting back at anyone. In fact, we can just all assume that any bad examples involved FOLCs who've already left the fandom, so it couldn't possibly be any of us <g>
Make any sense? Discuss amongst yourselves!
PJ