Yes, I actually said that. Possibly whilst caffeinated.
I was chatting with a mate about book sales, and it slipped out: I’d rather get reviews than sales. Not that I’d turn down either. But priorities matter.
Priority One: Write
The first goal is to write. I wrote for years before publishing a single page. The ideas pile up in my head like unwashed dishes, and writing is how I clear the sink. I write for myself. Call it narcissism if you must – but it’s a productive narcissism.
Priority Two: Be Read
Then comes the hope of being read. A sale is not a reader. Someone might buy your book and never open it. They might read it and hate it. They might toss it into the void. I just want to know.
Last month, I gave away over a hundred copies of Sustenance. Four reviews. One was one-star – she loathed it. Good. At least I know. The other ninety-nine? A mystery. For all I know, they’re gathering digital dust on forgotten hard drives. To be fair, I’ve got thousands of neglected downloads myself, so no judgment. Still, if you did read it, I’d love to hear what you thought. Leave a review.
Priority Three: Money (the tedious bit)
I’m not a consumerist, nor a fan of money-based systems. Unfortunately, that’s the system we’ve got, so yes – I still appreciate sales. But sales without engagement are hollow victories.
Reviews (the absurd bit)
Some people email me their thoughts instead of posting reviews. Lovely, but invisible. I can’t quote a private email without looking like a fraud. I could always fake one —
Congratulations, you’ve finished a manuscript. You’ve pushed the boulder uphill, typed “The End,” and maybe even convinced yourself you’re done. Spoiler: you’re not. This is where beta readers come in — those kind souls who’ll slog through your draft and tell you whether it sings, stumbles, or just sits there like porridge. The trouble is, most writers don’t actually know what to ask them, and so they end up with feedback about as useful as a horoscope.
The first and most uncomfortable question is about intent. What are my goals in writing this, and did you see them? Most writers never ask, because it forces them to say what they meant in the first place. Are you interrogating free will? Trying to write a page-turner? Smuggling philosophy under the hood of a dystopian thriller? If your beta doesn’t see it, either you buried it too deep or you didn’t put it in at all. Of course, not every writer works with some grand meta in mind, but if you do, this is the question that makes or breaks the project.
If your story feels like homework, you’ve already lost.
Enjoyment comes next, even if it bruises the ego. Did they actually like reading it? If your story feels like homework, you’ve already lost. It’s better to know this from a sympathetic reader now than from Goodreads later. A related angle is pacing: where did the story drag? Readers know exactly where they reached for their phone, even if they’re too polite to say so without prompting. Ask them to point to the spots where the air went out of the room.
Did the conclusion feel like it belonged to the story’s own logic?
Characters are another litmus test. Which ones did they care about, and which ones left them cold? Writers are often too close to notice when a protagonist reads like cardboard, or when a side character steals the oxygen. Beta readers are your lab rats here, revealing who’s magnetic and who’s forgettable. The same goes for endings. Don’t ask if it was happy – ask if it was satisfying. Did the conclusion feel like it belonged to the story’s own logic? If the reader feels cheated, the manuscript isn’t finished.
World-building deserves its own interrogation, especially in speculative fiction. Readers will happily forgive dragons, AI dictators, or interstellar chalk drawings, but not inconsistency. If the rules of your world shift without reason, they’ll notice. In fact, coherence is more important than cleverness. The reader doesn’t need to understand every mechanism, but they do need to trust that you do.
Was there an image, a phrase, a scene that stayed with them once the book was closed?
Finally, ask what lingered afterwards. Was there an image, a phrase, a scene that stayed with them once the book was closed? That’s your gold. Double down on it. If nothing sticks, you’ve got polishing to do.
One last but often overlooked question is about the reader themselves: am I asking the right person? An excellent sci-fi enthusiast might not be your best pick for YA urban fiction. A romance aficionado won’t necessarily grasp the rhythms of a philosophy-laden dystopia. Fit matters. You wouldn’t ask a vegan to taste-test your steakhouse menu, so don’t ask the wrong reader to bless your book.
Am I asking the right person?
And here’s the tightrope for the beta reader: they are not there to tell you the book they would have written. Their job is to respond to the book you actually put on the page. It’s your manuscript, not a co-authorship audition. If their feedback starts with “what I would have done,” that’s not critique – that’s a rewrite.
The meta point is simple. Beta readers are not editors. They aren’t there to fix your commas or restructure your second act. Their value is in telling you what it feels like to read your book – hot, cold, flat, or electric. And if you’ve got a grand philosophical undercurrent humming beneath the surface, they’re the only ones who can tell you whether it came across.
Beta readers are not editors.
So don’t hand your beta readers a scalpel and ask them to perform surgery. Hand them your story and ask: did you taste what I meant to cook?
There’s a peculiar little ecosystem out there called the author’s forum. You’ve probably seen it – digital watering holes where writers congregate to swap tips, trade war stories, and, inevitably, flog their latest magnum opus like a Victorian street hawker with a sack of dubious oysters.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t begrudge other writers their moment in the sun. We all want our roses sniffed. But here’s the problem: I’m not looking for fellow gardeners. I’m looking for bees. Readers. Pollinators of stories. The ones who carry your words away, let them germinate somewhere else, and maybe if you’re very lucky leave a little honey in return.
Instead, these forums are like a row of market stalls where every vendor is shouting, “Buy my book!” at every other vendor. It’s a deafening loop of mutual advertising in which no one is actually in the market to buy anything. Imagine a cocktail party where everyone is giving a TED Talk at the same time. You can’t even taste the hors d’oeuvres for the noise.
Yes, there’s theoretical overlap; writers are often readers, and some might genuinely enjoy a novel by an unknown author. But the ratio is wildly off. Authors’ forums are not where most readers live. And when you do find a forum of book lovers, they’re usually busy discussing the books they’re already reading, not soliciting a cold pitch from a stranger waving around their unrecognised genius.
Bookseller and library forums? Same issue, just with a corporate gloss. They’re less like communities and more like speed dating events where every participant turns up with a PowerPoint presentation and a sales target.
I suppose it’s a rite of passage for indie authors: you wander into these places thinking you’ve found the gates to literary Shangri-La, only to discover you’ve walked into a multi-level marketing convention where everyone’s selling the same product in slightly different packaging.
So, I’ll keep my profile there, post occasionally and drop in to wave, but I know the audience I’m after isn’t there. The real trick, as ever, is finding the places where the readers live, and learning how to be interesting enough that they might actually care.
Let’s get one thing straight: not all feedback is good feedback. In fact, a depressingly large proportion of it is the literary equivalent of asking a vegan to review your steakhouse. Technically they read the menu, but were they ever really your audience?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
We live in a culture that treats opinion like currency. Everyone’s got one. Everyone’s desperate to spend it. And nowhere is this more evident than in the world of beta reading—a supposedly sacred process in which brave authors hand over their embryonic manuscripts to friends, lovers, ex-wives, and total strangers in the desperate hope someone will “get it.” Most don’t.
Know Thy Manuscript (Before It’s Murdered by Committee)
Before you even think about soliciting feedback, ask yourself: do you actually know what your manuscript is? Is it a quiet literary allegory disguised as sci-fi? A philosophical middle finger wearing the trench coat of genre fiction? A slow-burn deconstruction of capitalism wrapped in alien gloop?
If you can’t answer that, neither can your beta reader. And you’ll deserve every clueless comment that comes slouching back across your inbox like a drunken tortoise.
Audience Matters. (No, Really.)
Let me put it in culinary terms for the metaphorically impaired: if someone hates seafood, they are not qualified to tell you whether your oysters are overcooked. They might be able to describe their gag reflex in exquisite detail, but that’s not useful culinary feedback—that’s autobiography.
Likewise, if your beta reader consumes nothing but cosy mysteries and thinks House of Leaves was “a bit confusing,” why in the name of Borges are you handing them your experimental novella about time, recursion, and the semiotics of grief?
I Know a Writer. I Know Your Pain.
A personal note, if I may. A close friend is a writer. A good one, in fact. But our ideas are so philosophically incompatible that they could be placed on opposite ends of a Möbius strip. Every time they read my work, they suggest alterations that, while technically well-formed, have the uncanny knack of annihilating the entire point of the piece. When I respond, “That’s a great idea—why don’t you write it?” they get cross.
Because here’s the truth: most beta readers don’t give you feedback on your book. They give you notes on the book they wish you’d written.
Signal vs Noise: Spotting the Useful Reader
There’s a simple test I use to distinguish signal from noise.
Bad beta feedback:
“I didn’t like the main character.” “Why don’t they just call the police?” “This story would be better with a love triangle.”
Good beta feedback:
“The way you structured the timeline echoes the narrator’s fragmentation—was that deliberate?” “I wasn’t confused until Chapter 5, which made the earlier ambiguity retroactively frustrating.” “The tonal shift on page 42 feels earned but abrupt—was that intentional?”
In short: good feedback interrogates execution. Bad feedback critiques intention.
The Beta Reader Interview (Yes, You Need One)
You wouldn’t hire a babysitter without asking if they’ve ever met a child. Why would you let someone babysit your manuscript without screening for genre literacy?
Ask them:
What do you normally read?
What do you hate reading?
Can you name a book you loved that nobody else seemed to?
Have you read [Insert book similar to yours]? Did you like it?
If they look at you blankly or start talking about Colleen Hoover, back away slowly.
The Beta Reader Zoo: Know Your Species
Here are a few common subspecies to watch for:
The Rewriter: Wants to turn your Kafkaesque nightmare into Eat, Pray, Love. Run.
The Literalist: “But how would that actually work in real life?” Mate, it’s a parable. About entropy.
The Cheerleader: “Loved it! Don’t change a thing!” (Translation: I skimmed it during Bake Off.)
The Cynic: Thinks everything is nihilistic, including your dedication page.
The Goldilocks: Rare. Reads the book you actually wrote, not the one they wish you had. Cultivate this one like a bonsai tree.
Curate, Don’t Crowdsource
Beta reading is not a democratic process. You are not running a focus group for toothpaste branding. You are searching for a handful of individuals who understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether you’ve pulled it off—or fallen on your clever, post-structuralist arse.
Better three brilliant readers than thirty who think you should add a dragon in Chapter Two.
Final Thought
Your beta reader is not your editor. They’re not your therapist. And they’re definitely not your mum (unless your mum has an MA in critical theory and a fetish for broken narrative structures).
Choose wisely.
Or don’t – and enjoy reading thirty pages of feedback that begins, “I don’t usually read this sort of thing, but…”
PS: I love how Dall-E totally misfired on the cover image. lol
Ridley Park 