A Beta is Author Practice: Part 1

What to pay attention to while you look for beta readers

AKA: I go on the internet and search for people to invite to beta read a fake book

I would wager most people who have written a novel harbour a dream of going "full time". The daydream of walking into your book store and seeing an endcap full of your shinny new hardback is great. (Shout out to Quailridge books)

It's a nice thought, one I hope become a reality for many of you.

Know this! Being a writer and being an author are different jobs. The core professional skill of a writer is writing. The core professional skill of an author is attracting readers.

A slightly hyperbolic way to think of it:
Writing is what you have to do to become an author and once you are an author writing is what you get to do if you are good at being an author.

The beta process is your chance to practice being an author. It is teaching you skills you will need when you achieve success.

Let's talk about things your "author brain" should be paying attention to while you look for beta readers on the internet.

Finding Beta readers

Where is your audience hiding? Your audience is not hiding, they are desperate for you to find them.

This isn't hyperbole nor is it meant to make it sound like finding your audience will be easy it is simply the truth. Someone wants what you are writing (I am not saying it will be a lot of people but, come on, dinosaur erotica is a thing. Which is more likely, that no one is interested, or that you are not finding each other?)

What does this have to do being an author? Finding your beta readers will teach you where your broader audience lives.

I am going to choose a hypothetical genre and narrate my initial steps as I look for readers on the internet. Then I will try to glean the "author data" you should be noting as well.

Say I have written a magical portal story and want to find some beta readers. What would I do first? Talk to my friends and family and reach out over social media, that is always my first step. After that I will go to the google machine.

The first thing I learned is that googling "portal fiction" turns up a lot of fan fiction based on the Portal video game, and also portals to fan fiction. So I refined the search, adding quotation marks, tried "magical portal", portal stories and other variations. I didn't turn up a ton but I did find an article about Lev Grossman's top 5 portal stories, a Kirkus article on portals in fiction, a bestfantasy.com article on portal fiction(this article compared it closely to "crossworlds fiction", an io9 article from 6 years ago about the genre, and a couple LJ posts arguing about how much editors want the subgenre. So I read those article and spend some time digging into the comments to see if people linked to other places.

Mine those comments! One of the 4 comments on the Kirkus articles is someone I know so I can add them to my list of potential beta readers. The first comment on the bestfantasy.com post, a fairly new article, is recommending a book that they read an early copy of, maybe a sign that they are already beta readers?

I then do the same thing on goodreads. There are reading lists of portal fiction. Goodreads made a connection between portal ficton and stories where people enter mmorpgs or virtual worlds ala Tron. All the books on the reading list have reviews from people who are part of he goodreads community.

I then did the same thing on Amazon and noticed the top returns. I checked out how people are reviewing the books, checked out what people who bought The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe and the Magicians also bought, which I learned was Lev Grossman's book from the article google spit back.

Then I did the same thing on reddit. I was hoping for a portal fiction subreddit but did not find one (there may be one, who knows it could just have a ridiculous name, but I didn't find it in 15 minutes) I did find two discussions about the genre one by searching for "crossworld fiction" thanks previous article and one just from searching for portal fiction. The first poster in the crossworlds discussion said that they are usually called "portal fantasy" a term I had not been trying when I searched.

I revisited google, goodreads, and reddit with the term "portal fantasy" and found a discussion about portal fantasy on amazon. the number of goodreads reading lists had gone from 3 to 7. I also found that reddit had used portal fantasy as a weekly writing prompt in the last 12 months.

So if you are looking for beta readers who have 0 connection to you, you now have about 200 potential people to reach out to. You need around 5 so you are shooting for a 2.5% uptake, should be doable.

That is not what this is about though. That is for your writer job. This post is for your author job.

So let me pull out some things I discovered while looking for readers for my hypothetical portal book.

1. Who is talking about what you do?

Anyone who has written an article about a subgenre is your ally. Record their name, even if the article was a decade ago, (especially if the article was a decade ago, the topic will have had time to freshen again for them) If they are passionate enough to write about a subgenre once chances are the topic will interest them again. If you book doesn't have a subgenre make note of people who are writing articles you like about your area of writing, also people who might be writing about related things. Writing a book about a WW2 tank driver, WW2 vehicle enthusiasts might be both great beta readers and great future exposure or audience.

2. Who are your predecessors and peers?

Writing Catholic archeology conspiracy novels? Better know who Dan Brown is. Writing romantic English countryside comedies of manners and haven't read Jane Austin? You have to at least be aware of her work, and you should really consider reading it. Your work will always be in conversation with other writer's work and the more particular your style or niche is the stronger that engagement will be. That means be aware.

Predecessors:

The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Alice in Wonderland came up a lot. So it is fairly certain I will at least subconsciously be invoking them in a readers mind if I use the term portal fiction. This is true even if I have not read those books. Turns out those are the foundational books of the subgenre my fake book is in.

As an author, it is valuable to think about where your work is positioned in relationship to the giants of your genre. Do you want to align your work with their tradition or distance yourself? It isn't an either/or choice but not doing either is also a choice.

Peers:

His Dark Materials, the Magicians, and Neil Gaiman's work were modern examples that came up often. An author needs to be aware that they do not exist in a vacuum. You need to choose how much or how little you want to know about what other people are doing with the themes you have chosen to work with. Willful, aggressive ignorance is a choice as is educating yourself about the area you are working in, but understand you won't get a free pass if you're accidentally copying ideas that have been well-established by other writers. Be sure you can defend it when it comes up. An easier path is to know who is writing things like you.

Keep a list of peers for when you need a cover blurb.

3. Is there a different way to think about your book?

You have an idea about what your book is and why people will like it. Idea is probably too weak a word, vision might be closer. That vision helped you write your book. Thinking like an author requires you to take a step back and think not about that vision but about what your book has and why people will like it.

You see it all the time on TV. 10 years ago CBS commissioned a show from uber producer Chuck Lorre, a comedy vehicle for Johnny Galecki, an actor fairly well known from Roseanne. Most people now associate The Big Bang Theory with Sheldon. The same elements are still all there but what people responded to was a little different.

How did my hour and half of portal fiction help prepare me for thinking that way? I saw many examples of portal fiction. Dr. Who, Outlander, and Coraline where all mentioned. I think of Dr. Who as a relationship drama, Outlander as romance and Coraline as a children's fable. Maybe my imaginary portal book is really about the dynamic interplay between the made up main character and her sentient backpack Dylan and the grumpy nanobot dragon she carries around in Dylan.

You can't resist what people like about your book. If you are not prepared for people to embrace and love your work for something surprising then you are not ready to be an author.

4. How do readers describe books in your genre?

I came away with two thoughts from my brief research. People often equated portal fiction with children's books, YA, or "for kids" in the pejorative and people mention humor a lot. If I wanted a fuller picture I would need to read more but even that at-a-glance impression is something to embrace and note.
In almost all areas of life we are dealing with preconceptions, either fighting against them or benefiting from them. As an author you need to be aware of what preconceptions people have of the area you are working in.

How else will you be able to say, "Hey you know that think you love about books like this? I do a bunch of that." or "Hey you know that thing that everyone else does in books like this? I don't do that, try something different." It is a simple idea but super important

5. Where will your book exist in the broader media world?

We think of ourselves as writers writing books and we are in search of readers. An author is a creator who is in search of an audience. (I am going to say audience because words like brand, consumer, messaging, etc. kind of make my eyes glaze over, but they are useful words)

What is the difference. Every media wants the audience. Once you are an author you are not competing only with other authors. You are competing with tv, movies, youtube clips, bloggers, comics, webcomics, puzzles, video games, and so on forever.

Knowing your books position in the media world is important for the same reasons it is important to know where it exists in relationship to other books. I already mentioned the tv show Dr. Who. The shows Stargate and Sliders where also mentioned frequently as I was searching. That is three portal based sci-fi television shows. The internet tells me that SLiders had 5 seasons, Stargate 3 different tv shows, 3 movies, a cartoon and a video game, and Dr. Who has 826 episodes and 263 serials. What does that tell my author brain? Two things #1 the popular consciousness has a lot of examples of portal sci-fi and #2 there is an audience for portal sci-fi. As an author that means you have hooks you can use to promote your book as well as some data about previous successes in the field to back up your ideas.

That ended up being LOOOOOOOONNNNG! Come back for part two when we talk about:

Using your beta to polish your pitches

Using your beta to discover why people like you

and

Your beta as author character development

Those will all have to wait until part 2.