Beta Reader Riches

 

My middle-grade historical fiction is aimed at children in the 3^rd to 6^th grades, so I use students from a local school as beta readers. I ask the school for eight volunteers—preferably two from each of those four grades—and rely on the principal and the teachers to select them. They usually manage to come up with all eight, but occasionally it is seven and once it was only six. So I was surprised and pleased when the principal called a week ago and said he had given out all eight copies of my most recent manuscript and had an additional three (later four) students who wanted to be beta readers.

I said that was fine and made more copies. Making those extra copies cost me time and money, and I also give each beta reader a $10 Amazon gift card. This means that too many beta readers could get expensive. On the other hand, beta readers are essential for insuring the quality of the final product, especially because it has been decades since I was the same age as my audience. The questionnaire I ask them to fill out gives me many insights into how well the story works for children that age, including the vocabulary. If there were words they didn’t understand even in context, I strengthen the context, find replacement words, or even discover that I don’t need the passage at all.

Since I write historical fiction, I ask my readers to give me the page numbers of any passages that sound like a boring history lesson. Over the years I’ve gotten much better at avoiding that, and these days the answer is often “none.” But when they do list page numbers, I look at each of those passages to see if it advances the story. If it does, I try to find a better way to say it, which often involves shortening a description or summarizing a quote. If it doesn’t advance the story, I leave it out. I write historical fiction because I want my readers to learn about their country’s past, but telling a good story is always more important than any lesson I want to teach.

Every comment I receive from my beta readers is seriously considered. No, I don’t take all of their suggestions, but I do take many of them—possibly even the majority. When my first group of beta readers said they wanted to know what happened to my main character after she left an internment camp and moved to Chicago, I added an epilogue. A more recent story began with a house fire that kills the protagonist’s parents. She is taken in by a missionary family preparing to travel around Cape Horn to the gold fields in California. After that, the story mostly forgot about the fire. That wasn’t intentional, but it was an oversight. One beta reader suggested I add a small fire on the ship that shows the protagonist’s fears even if nobody gets hurt. I not only did that, but I added other references to show the effect the fire had on her, and the book is much better for it.

Those are just two examples. Over and over, I have incorporated beta reader comments that strengthened the story and made the book better.

Beta readers are invaluable, and I’m grateful for every one.

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The image at the top of this post is from the 1925 edition of Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. The illustrator was Clara Miller Burd, and the illustration is in the public domain because of its age.