You Beta Ask Somebody
Organize Your Beta Feedback Like a Boss
Welcome to the second month in a row in which the first Shelf Life of the month falls on the first day of the month, a Tuesday. This month, this March of 2022, the last day of the month is a Thursday and thus a Shelf Life day. A ten-Shelf Life month. That is the maximum amount of Shelf Life in one month allowed by law (ie, by the law of nature). Please prepare accordingly for the amount of content. Set aside an appropriate amount of time for reading (appropriate amount of time may well be none; only you can judge).
Today I am pleased to deliver a Shelf Life article several weeks in the making as I had to design a study—with participants! and controls!—to bring it to you. I don’t always plan my Shelf Lifes ahead of time but when I do I hope they’re useful. The process was useful for me at least. My efforts shan’t be wasted even if no one needs or wants this content.
I have written in the past about the importance of seeking critical feedback on your writing by sending early drafts out to beta readers for review. I’ve talked about why you should do that, and who you should ask for this kind of feedback, and today I am going to talk about methodology for soliciting and collecting that feedback, specifically regarding some tools available out there on the world wide web for free.
I have a small cadre of beta readers who read my fiction sometimes and I appreciate the heck out of these folks. This is definitely a favor they do for me, probably more like a chore if I’m being honest. I try not to lean on any one person too much but it’s really helpful to get a handful of reads back early that help me direct any needed revisions. Sometimes I cycle them out to the readers when they’re near final, too, just to get a reality check on whether I have written a hot pile of garbage. Everybody keeps saying no but I’m pretty sure they’re just being nice.
Until very recently—up until I began trying out apps for this article—my method of beta solicitation was:
Save a Google Docs copy of the manuscript going out for review with the beta reviewer’s initials in the filename;
Share the document to the reviewer via email with their access level set to “Commenter”;
Instruct them to let me know (via email, text, phone call, etc) when they are done reading;
Send them some follow-up questions via email and wait on those responses.
I find this significantly more efficient than attaching a Word document to an email, but it still has its drawbacks—one of the drawbacks is that I get spammed with emails when someone is actively making comments.
Then recently I learned about two web applications that can help manage the beta reading process for authors. They are BetaBooks.co and BetaReader.io. I have a healthy pipeline of manuscripts right now that could use feedback so I figured I’d use these apps to collect beta feedback on a short story and then collect some feedback on the apps. I went ahead and made an account in each, loaded in a short story, and invited several readers (different readers) to each environment. Having run the manuscripts through both apps, I am prepared to walk you through how these apps can assist you with your feedback gathering process and compare their merits and drawbacks.
Thanks to my intrepid beta readers who signed up to help out with this experiment by reading “Stone Test”: GB, JA, MH, RA, SN, and VR. Their invaluable help—wait for it—killed two birds with one stone. (This pun was made from 100 percent post-consumer materials.)
I started with BetaBooks.co and loaded in a short story. The first thing I noticed is that BetaBooks is set up for books. A free account allows you to collect beta feedback on one book, and there is no option to create shorter, self-contained manuscripts. This wasn’t a problem as I just named my book “Story Title and Other Stories” and dropped my short story in as the first chapter. It would have been nice to see some flexibility in terms of how you can set up a project; the app calls for a novel, but you can jury rig it for other formats.
The formatting allowed in your BetaBooks manuscript is very basic. Bold, italics, scene breaks, block quotes, and embedded links. I appreciate this mostly you shouldn’t be too bogged down in formatting and, besides—as their instructions note—people will be reading on all sizes of screen so you can’t be too precious. However, some of my short fiction is not formatted like a traditional story and wouldn’t be able to go into the application. Poetry could also present difficulties.
In addition to pasting in your manuscript, you have an opportunity to give beginning-of-chapter guidance and end-of-chapter guidance. This is super useful and mirrors my usual process wherein I give specific guidance for the beta ahead of the read and then follow up with some specific questions. This format let me embed the specific questions right at the end so readers can address them after reading and I don’t have to follow up.
I turned my readers loose on the draft in BetaBooks.co. The free account allows up to three readers so I invited three people, and was treated to an update when each accepted my invitation and then again when each reader started their read. However, terribly unfortunately, all the readers status still says “started”—even though one reader finished, left feedback, and answered the follow-up questions. The app doesn’t seem to realize that person finished. Oops.
Readers are not able to make inline comments in the free account (this feature is available in paid) but they can leave summary comments. The interface is easy to use and not confusing, but the data collected is not at all robust. “Track by Reader” only tells you when someone started and doesn’t notice when readers finish. The only indication I had that my reader had finished was their comment.
I wanted to try this application out from a reader’s perspective, too, but there was no smooth way to make this happen—no way to communicate with my fellow authors or see their work, no option to make my own work accessible to other account holders who might be willing to read and give me feedback. If I wanted to beta read a story on BetaBooks.co for the purpose of this article, I would have had to persuade a friend to use it or track down someone already using it and contacting them outside the system.
The verdict is, this app is fairly limited in terms of the functionality and the data you get. Plus, the pricing is quite high: $14.99/month for the lower-tier account or $34.99/month for a pro account. This seems like an obscene amount of money, to me, for the functionality you get. Given that one of their selling points is tracking reader progress and the app didn’t do that, there’s no way I’d pay cash money for this. To put it in perspective, my Duotrope account is $5/month and my Evernote account is $7.99/month and while they’re not the same kind of app, they both offer so much more usefulness to me than this app that the price difference astounds.
Next I tried out BetaReader.io. Right off the bat, BetaReader allows inline commenting in the free account. This is pretty huge as I can’t imagine delivering a beta read without using inline comments, though many people do. The next thing I noticed is that when you add a section to your manuscript, you have the options of “chapters” or “surveys.” If you elect to insert a survey, you can add specific questions for your readers to answer and you can request the answers in the form of text, multiple choice, checkbox, or a linear scale. This is immediately more functionality than BetaBooks had.
I invited my three readers and was notified when they accepted. I also am able to see when they started my story, what their farthest position in the story was, and when (if) they finished. After reading the short story I included, both readers who completed the text spotted the “next” link that took them to the survey questions I had left for them, and responded to the questions. The readers were also prompted (on finishing) to rate three metrics—overall, plot, and grammar—on a scale of one star to five stars, and were prompted to leave at least a short review.
I’m able to see a lot more data in BetaReader.io than I was in BetaBooks.co. In addition to the star ratings and the possibility of getting readers to rank specifics on a linear scale, the site also tracks some key metrics: What final manuscript position did my readers reach? That is, I can see the end point of each reader plotted on a graph. I get an average time to read, and also a chart of engagement (if readers interacted with emojis, which mine didn’t).
I’m able to see their survey answers question by question (the answers can be downloaded to CSV if you wish to work with the data), and the site also lets me know if I “lost” readers: If a reader “gives up” on your story they have the option of letting you know why (“I lost interest”; “I didn’t have enough time” [which means they lost interest]; or “other reason”).
Helpfully, BetaReader.io also allows authors to beta read for their fellow authors and for readers to sign up without being invited. So there is a pool of users who are open to being asked to beta read—you don’t necessarily have to bring your own readers. (You set your account to specify whether you’re available to read or not.)
I took advantage of this functionality by finding another writer’s short story and beta reading it for them to check out how the content flow is for the reader. I sent a request to the writer to beta read their short story and received approval, and their story was added to my reading list. I read it over a few days and left them some inline comments and a detailed review. I received a nice thank-you note in the chat function from the author so that was nice to get.
BetaReader.io only has two price points: Free (limited functionality) and premium, which is $9.99 per month and unlocks all the functionality. While $14.99/month felt like way too much for the value proposition offered by BetaBooks.co, $9.99/mo feels much more reasonable for BetaReader.io considering it’s less monthly and you get better and more functionality.
Overall, my thoughts are thus: I could not get by with just three readers, possibly because I write short fiction. With a novel three readers might be ample if they read chapter after chapter for you, but I don’t like to hit up the same three people again and again because I don’t want to wear out my welcome. I would seriously consider a paid account to BetaReader.io in order to include more readers in my list, recruit readers from the available account holders who might be a good fit, swap beta reads with other writers, and collect helpful data from my readers.
Both applications offer a discount of two months free if you pay for your subscription annually, so this brings the monthly cost of BetaReader.io down further to $8.25 per month, which feels like a comfortable price—for me—for the value on offer.
Next time you’re schlepping files around to your betas and filling a spreadsheet to remind yourself who’s reading what and when it’s due back—check out these applications that do most of the lifting for you. If you use the services of beta readers regularly, these apps (especially BetaReader.io) can really save you some administrative headaches and improve the quality of the feedback you get.
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Definitely sharing this one!