Betas make you better
For the April A-Z blogging challenge, I’ll be blogging (almost) daily about my latest release, The Caretaker of Imagination.
Like game developers, writers use ‘betas’ to test early versions of a story. After the story is drafted, edited, edited again and then re-editedre-edited, we often send it out to our beta readers. Authors can have anywhere from 1 to 20+ beta readers, and I had about 15 for The Caretaker of Imagination! By the time I wrote Lucy’s Story: The End of the World, I was confident enough in my own ability to write a narrative with less feedback. I’d also found an editor, Jeni Chappelle, who was just the right amount of critical and enthusiastic.
One interesting thing that happened completely by accident is that all my beta readers either wrote books for grown-ups, or weren’t writers at all. At the time, this felt like a draw-back, but in hindsight I think it was a great benefit. It meant that I got a wide range of feedback, and that my betas picked out issues that other children’s authors may not have noticed.
If you’re interested in the book, you can purchase it from one of the links below:
