Moving Toward Publication: Beta Readers and Book Design on My Work-in-Progress

It’s a scary time for me right now—I’ve sent my current manuscript out to the first people beyond my critique group. In writers’ parlance, these people are called beta readers. The book isn’t done—it can still be changed—but it’s far enough along that major revisions would be painful and, for independent authors such as me, would delay the publication process.

First came the angst of asking, of finding the right beta readers. I asked myself whether there were writers with whom I could trade services whom I have not already shamelessly exploited. And I asked whether there were people who know and like me well enough that I felt comfortable asking them to spend a chunk of time reading my book in a not-yet-polished form.

And, most importantly, I asked whether I trusted the input these people would provide me. Do they know enough to provide either good substantive knowledge of the topics and issues in my book, or do they have a good enough eye for editing that they can help find typos and grammatical errors?

Thankfully, I know quite a few people who fit one or more of these criteria.

Last week, I screwed up my courage and asked people to read my book. I got seven takers. That’s enough. Three is a minimum, in my opinion, and more than seven or eight provides an overwhelming amount of feedback. After all, they will all tell me something different. It’s when the feedback overlaps that I have to take particular note of it.

Then came sending the book to the beta readers in their desired digital format. I formatted the book in Word, PDF, MOBI (Kindle), and EPUB (Nook), and launched it to my various beta readers as they requested. Now it’s out there for them to tell me what’s working and not working in the story.

As soon as I hit “SEND,” I started finding errors myself in the text, including a mis-numbered chapter. I cringed. What will my friends think of me for making such a glaring mistake?

Oh, well, that’s why I wanted beta readers. They keep me humble, and help me help myself.

My next step is to edit the book with a fine-toothed comb while I wait for the beta readers to provide their input. This time around, I am having Word read the text to me out loud, so that I can catch weird phrasing.

My beta readers will send me their feedback by mid-August, and then I’ll repeat the editing process one more time, using their comments as my guide. Then, I hope, I’m ready for the final proofreading and formatting for publication.

To format the book for my beta readers as described above, I abandoned Scrivener. I tried working with the compile feature in the Scrivener 3 beta version for Windows, but I quickly got lost. It’s very powerful, but overwhelming to learn. Instead, I dumped the manuscript from Scrivener into Word and spent a couple of days formatting it the way I want it to look in the paperback version. The good news about this step is that I finally got the hang of Section breaks in Word. Once I had all the formatting set up in Word, I created the PDF version.

Then I imported the Word file into Calibre, and converted the text to MOBI and EPUB ebook formats in Calibre. Calibre doesn’t output ebooks exactly the way I want, but it is fine for the beta reader phase. I might play around with Scrivener’s compile feature more before I publish. If not, Calibre will be adequate. (If I weren’t a control freak, I wouldn’t bother trying to compile in Scrivener.)

As this post describes, I’m at the stage in the novel where I am dealing with editing, formatting, book design, back-cover marketing text, and other pre-publication tasks. I enjoy these technical tasks, though they can be frustrating. I’d rather be writing, but I can’t move on to another book until this one is done, which will take a few more months to finish.

But I am beginning to think about the plot of my next book. Last week, I wrote a thousand-word summary of the novel as I see it now. I’m hoping to have a decent overview of the plot and characters by the time it’s time to start writing.

Such is the multi-tasking life of an independent author.

What do you wish you knew about publishing?