Ann Ehlert asked Paul Michael Peters:

How many people see your book before the rest of the world? Do they see it in fragments or only when you are finished?

Paul Michael Peters There’s a process called beta readership. If you were to become a beta reader for an author, and there are many authors out there looking for good beta readers, you get to read early versions of their work. On the plus side, you get to read free versions of the early work. On the downside, you get to read early versions of an author’s work. Believe me you don’t want to see the first three drafts of anything I write.

This is where the idiom comes from in writing; writing is rewriting.

I have a very talented person in Atlanta Georgia who has been my editor for the last three books. Her name is Brooke Payne. Brooke is very patient. Brooke is very detail oriented. Brooke breaks it to me gently when things go horribly wrong. She says things like, “have you ever considered trying it this way?” “What if it ends like this?” “How is your day job?” Brooke is very professional and I appreciate more and more the day I met her.

There are other people who have volunteer in the past to read early versions of my work. The process usually breaks down like this; draft two is full of spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. No one gets to see draft one but me. In draft two, the beta reader tells me things they like and they don’t like. These are line items or general comments. I go back and fix. Drafts two through four are often structural or character development. Draft number five is often detailed in corrections and steps to make everything amazing (from Brooke).

She may see drafts 2, 4, 5. While others see drafts 3 and 5.

The most number of people who’ve read any one of my particular books was The Symmetry of Snowflakes, where I had five readers, two of whom were paid ‘Book Doctors’.

A book doctor is just what it sounds like. A paid professional to read your work and provide a diagnosis or treatment. I find this is money well spent. I don’t mind paying people to be honest and detailed about what I’ve written. I don’t like it if I pay someone for that work and they spend all the time on the first quarter of the book, with a few jotted notes during the other ¾ of the work. So it is difficult to find people who will be honest, who read a lot, and are willing to help you shape hundreds of pages into something better.

Could I do this all on my own? Maybe. But I am better for surrounding myself with people who will push and challenge me to do better. On my own, I might not try as hard. But writing for Brooke, I know that she won’t respect me if I don’t produce a certain quality of work. Actually, I am not sure if she respects me. I only hope that she will respect me for a certain level of work.

Finding that group of people to work with and getting into a process took the most amount of time. If you can A) Find your voice and write, B) Find a process that works for you, and C) Repeat the process going forward for success (how you define success)… Then you are way ahead of me. Those three steps took the better part of 2-3 years.

I can recommend some people and steps to help you get there faster if interested.

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