I have a couple of general updates before we get into the meat of today's post. First of all, I have now completed the first round of edits on Ashael Rising and have submitted them so I have a little bit of breathing space before the next round begins. I'll mostly be using that to pack up the house for our move, but I also want to try and create a structure for this blog. The second thing is my new proposed structure. My intention is to post three times a week, most likely Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Monday will be updates on my own writing along with thoughts on my process and lessons I'm learning along the way. Wednesdays will be when I talk about books I'm reading. At the moment, my plan is to take part in the WWW Wednesdays meme, talking about what I'm reading every second Wednesday. I'm aiming to provide reviews for books that I've been reading on the intervening weeks. Every second Friday will be Flash Friday. I will post a piece of Flash Fiction of around 1000 words. I'm happy to accept prompts for this, so please feel free to leave prompts in the comments. The intervening weeks will see posts about something that I have been inspired by or found useful in my writing journey. Let me know what you think of this plan in the comments!
One thing that every author needs is Beta Readers. These are the first people who will read your manuscript beginning to end and give you feedback. Does the plot work? Are your characters fleshed out enough? Does anyone really care about that subplot you sweated over for months?
Beta Readers will give you insight into how your book is actually working as a whole and they are invaluable. Andrew Burleson and Paul Kilpatrick have worked very hard to design an app that makes this process easy. Andrew was one of my own beta readers as well as being an author so he has a really good understanding of both sides of the process.
BetaBooks is designed to be very user friendly for authors and readers alike - I have used it in both capacities, as one of the early testers. BetaBooks makes it easy to :
- Privately share your book with beta readers
- Review all your feedback in one place, and easily organize it to suit your needs.
- See how far into the book each beta reader has gotten.
- Upload revisions and compare versions of the work side by side.
- As a reader, keep track of how far you've gotten through each book
- Move between chapters
- Leave and edit feedback on each chapter
As the site is still growing, it is currently invitation only. If you think the site might be of use to you, you can request an invitation and give my name as a referrer.
As an author, you can upload an entire novel, invite your beta readers to join and control who has access to everything and when. I strongly recommend the site, please do give it a try if it would be of use to you, and be sure to let me know how you get on!
