BellaOnline Forums Career Fiction Writing Post Here to FIND or BE a beta reader of fiction!

One of the items on my year-goals list is to publish my sci-fi novel. It's done. The issue is that some of my beta readers felt it was too much like my medieval novels, but set in space. I suppose I like my medieval novels so to me that's a win . But I'm trying to figure this out.

If anybody's willing to take a look at it, let me know and I'll send it along. It's an adventure-romance in the genre of Star Trek. A group of intrepid explorers looking to surmount challenges.

Beta readers are well-read in their genres and give detailed reader feedback to a writer BEFORE a piece of fiction is submitted to agent or editor, or self-published. Typically they receive an electronic copy of the manuscript (which should be a complete first draft that is as smooth and polished as the writer can manage on his or her own), and they email back a detailed reaction/comments. The writer gets invaluable feedback, and the beta reader gets a free read and the satisfaction of being deeply influential in a writer's publishing process.

See my collected articles on beta readers for more info.

And please feel free to post here if you would like to FIND a beta reader or BE a beta reader. You can then private-message each other through the forum to work out the details.

This sounds very appealing. You've also given me an idea about posting a thread for beta readers and authors to find each other. Let me try to do a merge of this topic with that one.

Val -

I'm not sure if it would be easy to manage if all requests for readers were in one large thread - it'd be hard to keep track of who asked for what book and who was responded to. And the feedback. Just a thought . On GoodReads each beta-reading-book thread is its own separate entity for that reason.

Hmmm, I see what you mean. And I may have acted too impulsively in that I don't see a way to unmerge your thread and put it back! Hmmm. Let me leave it here for now (no other choice) and look into how they do it on Goodreads.

I've tweaked a new cover for my upcoming SciFi novel, Aquarian Awakenings. I'd love any feedback on it! And the book is ready for beta readers. It's about 300 pages. No explicit language / sexual content. Let me know if you're interested in taking a look! Even just a review of the first few chapters would be quite helpful.

Wow! Love the cover. I'll take a peak if you like. I'd love to be a beta reader. It's stretching my genre muscles.

Jana - sure thing! What format would you like?

Trying a new font for my Aquarian Awakenings novel. Suggestions? Still seeking beta-readers. #sciencefictionromance

My unvarnished opinion is the cover looks amateurish. Sorry.

Dear Jilly -

The original cover design was going to look like this -



So hopefully at least I'm moving in the right direction . I liked the original but it felt more like a horoscope book to me.