Authors are paying to send their Beta Books out, with the purpose of receiving back useful and thoughtful feedback (in the form of completed questionnaires) that they can use to improve their books ahead of publication. The Beta Readers chosen are being paid to provide that feedback.
As is the case in any job, if someone is consistently performing their job poorly, they are not usually asked to continue doing the job. And while it is always solely up to Hidden Gems whether or not to continue sending books to any particular reader, we need the feedback from the authors to help us determine if the readers are doing a good job.
As such, after all questionnaires are submitted and the Beta Book job is complete, the authors are encouraged to give a rating (out of 5) to each of the Beta Readers that worked on it. They are also given the option to either block any of those readers from signing up for any of their future books, or request a reader to be given preference if they sign up for any of their future books.
Hidden Gems monitors the ratings and if it looks like a reader is being poorly rated, we will investigate. We may determine that the rating given by an author wasn’t justified (perhaps they just didn’t like the answers that were given, as opposed to the answers being of poor quality) and thus ignore them, or we may determine that a Beta Reader isn’t really putting in enough effort in answering their questionnaires to justify sending them any more books.
It is always up to Hidden Gems to determine this, and each case will be different. In some cases we may send an email to the reader for their feedback on the situation, and in other cases we may not. Sometimes we may not remove a reader completely, but may send them less books so that we can watch closely to see if their performance improves. In most cases, we would likely be looking for a pattern of poor performance before removing a reader from the program, as opposed to just a single case where their questionnaire lacked useful detail. However, there are at least a couple of exceptions to this:
- Trial readers are typically only asked to read one book (since they are not being paid) and the decision to promote them to full, active status is dependent on the answers they provide in that one case
- Any user that submits a questionnaire with garbage or completely useless answers (as determined by Hidden Gems) that was obviously meant to simply get their form submitted by the deadline and get paid will not be given any further book offers and removed from the program going forward