A beta reader isn’t an editor or a proofreader. They’re the closest you’ll get to watching a stranger read your book, and most writers waste them.

Send it after your own pass, not before

It’s tempting to send the draft the day you type “the end”, because you can’t bear to look at it again. Don’t. You only get one first read per person, and spending it on problems you already know about is a waste.

Do the pass you can do alone first: the chapter that sags, the character whose name drifted, the filler words you use nine times a page. Then send it. What you want back is the things you can’t see yourself, and you won’t know which those are until you’ve fixed the ones you can. The self-editing checklist has the order to do that pass in.

Three or four readers, not twelve

Past four, the notes start contradicting each other, and when notes contradict each other the natural thing is to try to please everyone. That usually means sanding off the parts of the book someone loved.

Four gives you enough signal to spot a pattern. If three of them slowed down in chapter nine, chapter nine is the problem. If one of them did, that’s one reader’s taste, and you can ignore it.

Ask three questions, not “any feedback?”

“Let me know what you think” produces “I really enjoyed it!”, which is kind and useless. Give them a brief instead:

  1. Where did you get bored? Not where was it bad. Where did you consider putting it down, or start skimming.
  2. Where were you confused? Who is this, where are we, wait, when is this.
  3. Where did you stop believing someone? The moment a character did something that felt like the author needed it rather than the person wanting it.

Those three cover most structural problems, and they ask readers what happened to them, not what to do about it. A reader saying they got lost in chapter four is useful. The same reader suggesting you add a flashback is less useful, and you don’t have to take it.

Tell them not to line edit. A beta reader who hands the draft back with the commas moved has usually just not been told what the job is.

What to send

Send something that’s easy to read and easy to keep track of.

For readers on a phone or an e-reader, an EPUB. For readers who want to scribble, a PDF. Word works if you want comments in the text, but it invites the line editing you just asked them not to do.

Give each reader their own copy with their name on it. Your unpublished novel probably won’t leak, but if it does, the watermark is how you’ll know whose copy it was. Galley’s Share a copy makes one watermarked copy per reader from a list of names, as an EPUB, a PDF or a link that opens the book in a reader. A link can have a password and an expiry date, shows you whether it’s been opened, and can be turned off.

Give them a deadline and a way out

Four to six weeks is a reasonable ask for a novel. Give them the date, and say that if life gets in the way they should tell you instead of going quiet, so you know whether to chase.

Expect some to drop out. Two out of four coming back is normal.

Beta readers are not ARC readers

These get mixed up a lot, and they happen at opposite ends of the process.

A beta reader reads an unfinished draft, privately, to tell you what is wrong with it. An advance reader copy goes out weeks before publication, after the book is finished, to get reviews in time for launch.

Sending an unrevised draft to an ARC list is how a book gets its first one-star review, and that review stays up after you fix the chapter.

Then decide what to change

This is the hard part. Readers are good at telling you where they stumbled and not so good at telling you why. Collect the places they stumbled, look for the ones more than one person hit, and work out the cause yourself.

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