Tiz is ready for beta testing! Reach out to me so you can get involved today! Contact me on social media.
“Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=brigitte+devin+davis&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
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Get ahold of Krissy Barton with Little Syllables editing services. She does free sample edits to see if you and she would be the right fit. www.littlesyllables.com
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Twitter: @authordevind
The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage.
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the show Writing in the Tiny House. The entire point of this podcast is to help the tormented artist by sharing what I know about writing, publishing, and stress management, so that you can have the tools to produce the content that you have been eager to write. If you have the steps in place, you can produce a short story in as few as three months or a novel in as few as 18. And hopefully through the ideas in this podcast, you will have the wisdom to adjust that timeline if you need to. I am Devin Davis, the guy who lives and writes in a tiny house in Northern Utah. Thank you for tuning in, and please enjoy today's episode of Writing in the Tiny House.
Hello? Hello. Hello, [00:01:00] and welcome to the show Writing in the Tiny House. Guys, it's been a really busy summer. How has your summer been? I am doing one last, well, actually, I don't know. It's hard to say just how many passes of a work in progress constitute a session of editing, but I've been doing more content edits more developmental edits for the past while.
And I'm feeling really, really good about my work in progress. Tiz is making huge strides toward being just kind of the perfect thing right now. And I'm getting super excited about it. I have a goal to get this round of developmental edits finished by this weekend so that I can move on to beta readers because we are at that point in our lives, my friends. So beta readers are super awesome and they are a huge part of the publishing process if you are professionally [00:02:00] self-publishing.
just really quickly. If you already know what a beta reader is, and you want to be a part of my beta reading team, please reach out to me on social media on Instagram. I'm @authordevindavis Davis and on Twitter. I'm @authordevind and I will hook you up that way.
If you don't know what a beta reader is, a beta reader is a person who read. A work in progress pretty casually, as casually as you would read anything else that you are reading for entertainment and then simply shares in some way, their experience with the author or whoever is doing the edits for the work that they are involved with. What that looks like.
So all of that is well and good, but this is kind of what the process looks like, just because we're all busy. We all have a lot to do. And a lot of people. Oh, I would love to beta read, but they don't fully understand the importance that they are playing in the process. So [00:03:00] usually when a work is to the point of beta reading, it has been through a number of developmental edits.
So in my case, I finished the work in progress and then I cleaned it up so that it would be ready for me to actually read. Because if you remember, I dictated my work. And that required a lot of tweaking afterward, which is fine. It, it was not a waste of time. And I was glad that I did it. It got me through, I cleaned it up as a way to just read it, to be able to sit back and read the content.
I did my own developmental edits, at least one round of them. And then I sent my story to my developmental editor, crystal and a critique partner as a way to. Have them show me holes that I might have missed. And I have had conversations with both of those people in some way, crystal, we speak on the phone and then this critique partner, she actually sent me a big document [00:04:00] with her thoughts and her notes and her suggestions.
And I have paid very close attention to both of those things. Now I'm working through it again, going through the developmental edits again, and things are improving. Things are better. Like the story is starting to bloom and I'm really excited to see that it's such a breath of fresh air to actually see what this can be to me, the magic of writing is in the edits anyway.
And so when you crash out your first draft and it looks like garbage because it is garbage, you are tilling the soil and planting seeds, and then it's through the developmental edits that you water the place so that plants can grow. And I'm seeing that with this. So. This is the way a beta reader program works. while you are certainly going to, let's say that you go ahead and you sign up for my beta reader [00:05:00] program, because you are super interested in what I am writing and you want. Part of it. And you want to be involved in this whole process because you love the arts.
You love fiction, you love fantasy fiction and how fun to be involved, right. Even if you're not a writer. So what happens is, and, and this is how it, it's a little bit different for every author, but I'm going to show you my. Program here and tell you a little bit about what other programs look like. So beta reading is in essence beta testing.
When a person, when a company or when a. Group of people develop a product. They need to test that product to make sure it's something that people want to use. And so if you have been a part of a beta testing trial with new products, what they do is they provide you with the [00:06:00] product so that you can use it.
And in fact, they may have some suggestions with specific applications for you to use it So that you can get a full feel of what the product is even for and what it's about. And then at the end, there's always a questionnaire. There is always a way for you to share your experience and offer feedback now with a beta reading program.
It's much the same thing. An author is asking a person to read a book. So in my instance, this novella, read it, read it casually, read it as you would. Any other book that you read for entertainment? This is not about studying. This is not about asking you for free editing stuff. This isn't that your role as a beta reader is not to sniff out all of the common mistakes and the misspelled words.
It is not to suggest [00:07:00] that this specific sentence would be better if you used this word instead of that word, that's not what beta reading is for. With beta reading, you have a manuscript that is not finished. And so we all just understand right away that it is not a perfect manuscript and there may be typos and little problems in it that you are going to be asked to ignore or to simply read.
Through. I mean, if you're reading and there's a, uh, a paragraph where a section that is really problematic, it is really good of you to mention that, but nobody expects you to put on your editing cap and try to flex your grammar muscles, cuz that's, that's not what the beta reader role is. Your role is to read it and then share with the author or whoever is doing the edits experience.
If you are [00:08:00] involved with a first time author, it is possible that they may not fully have a program developed. And so they may. Fully understand what sharing your experience needs to look like. It has been my experience with previous beta readers and just with other people who have read my stuff that you read a thing.
And then if someone simply says, share with me your experience, you don't really have a lot to say. You just read something, you experienced something, but you don't have words for it yet. So hopefully the program that you're entering into will have questions to kind of probe through your experience so that everybody can get an understanding for what worked, what didn't work.
And it's for the big parts of the story. It's for the relationships it's for setting it's for different things. A lot of authors will release [00:09:00] their books, especially if they have written a larger book and they are professionally self-publishing, they will release their book in sections to their beta readers so that they can have conversations fresh with each section of the book.
And they can gauge how each section of the book is doing instead of throwing this huge manuscript at somebody and expect them To read it and remember everything as they go through it. So, because TIS is a Nove, it's already a shorter document and there's no need for me to release it in sections. But oftentimes the author will say here's the first section or maybe the first chapter.
And then if they are prepared and they know what they're doing, they will have questions ready already for you to respond to. Questions about. How you felt, if there was tension in that specific chapter, if it was working for you, if the love [00:10:00] story is happening in a good way, just whatever the content is.
If they know what they are doing, they will ask. Specific questions and they'll have that ready for you to respond. And usually they will ask you to respond in a timely manner. Sometimes it can be a texting conversation. If it's somebody that, you know, on a more personal level, it can be a phone call. It can be something like Marco polo.
I don't know if. If you know what that app is, but it's basically video chatting or writing letters, but it's video. , that's how I feel that it is anyway. And you can go through and respond to those questions. It is important for you to be thorough. And it's important for you to be a little bit long winded.
super short answers to these questions are certainly helpful, but elaborating. On what you mean by those answers is always more useful, even if [00:11:00] you err, on the side of sharing too much. So sharing all the things, even if you feel all the things is kind of a lot to get through is very, very beneficial to a person who is gauging the content of their story.
And then once the beta reading project is over and done with, if it's an author, Has this all worked out, hopefully they are taking notes and they can go through and revise something or tweak something so that they can get ready to send it to their editor next. So this is a very important step in. All works in progress who were becoming professionally published professionally self-published.
And so again, if you are interested in joining my program, please reach out to me in social media. And I will, uh, I will announce that again at the end of this episode, here is, what other people's programs can look like sometimes. So a [00:12:00] lot of people will recommend 25. Beta readers to read their work in progress.
Sometimes it can be a struggle to find 25 people to read a book, especially if you're releasing a big book. If you're releasing this big epic fantasy thing, that's like 800 printed pages. It can be a lot to find people who can read that in a specific amount of time.
Just because if you're releasing on a schedule, you don't have six months for somebody to get around to reading your work in progress with these shorter works like with TIS and with BJE it. Take as long to find people to beta read, just because they are much shorter works. I mean, JE was just 9,000 words. TIS is 20,000 words. It's a proper novella, but they're not long documents. And so people can read them in a shorter amount of time and it's not as big of a [00:13:00] time commitment. with many people, they suggest 25 beta readers and. I know of some authors who go as high as 45 beta readers.
I have some mixed feelings about that. I do feel that you will flesh out absolutely everything. If you can get 45 people to read your work and respond to your thing. I also know that keeping notes on everybody's thoughts would be pretty tedious and a lot of people would end up sharing. The same things over and over again.
And if you want to endure that 45 times, then that's fine. I don't think that I'm going to be searching out 45 people to read ti. Also with my particular program, I like to release it to a small number of people get their input. And if there are glaring problems, I like to do another round of edits in order to fix those problems.
If I agree with them and then release it to [00:14:00] the next set of beta readers so that the manuscript can be continually improv. Before I send it off to my editor. So that's just kind of what the program looks like. That's what a program looks like. That's what beta readers are for beta readers are a huge part to the development of a book,
and like I said, it is beta testing to see if the book would land well, if people would like it, if people would buy it. And if the content is something that would stick around and come across as something important. So beta readers are super a big deal. And this is why all authors are super grateful for their beta reading team.
And that is it for today. Before we go, I need to say that my current work in progress Tiz the next installment of Tales from Vlaydor is ready for beta readers, people to read [00:15:00] the novella and share with me their experience. It's a big, important step before publishing. So if you wish to be a part of this project, reach out to me on my social media handles; on Instagram I'm @authordevindavis, and on Twitter I'm @authordevind. And remember that my short story Brigitte is available on Amazon as an ebook and on Audible as an audio book. Check those out today.
