Once an author has determined that they want beta reader feedback on their book ahead of publication, the first question many ask is where to find them?

There are a variety of ways to find beta readers, each with their own pros and cons so you need to consider each carefully when deciding how to best meet your needs. 

Friends and family

The whole reason to look for beta readers for an unpublished book is with the goal of improving the story ahead of publication, and to do so requires honest feedback, typically from readers of your genre.

Even if your friends and family are experienced readers of your book’s genre, how sure are you that they will provide you with honest feedback?  More likely, friends or family will hold back on giving feedback that may be critical and instead heap praise on the book in an effort to be supportive or save the author’s feelings.  But critical feedback is what an author needs most, which means they have to be sure that their readers are willing to be completely honest, even when it means saying something negative about specific aspects of the story – especially in those cases!

So while there are potential positives to using friends and family (they’ll usually do it for free, for example), you have to be absolutely sure that the feedback you get is completely honest and that the readers know enough about your genre to be able to comment on your story usefully.

Existing Fanbase

Some authors turn to their own mailing list, or social media followers, when looking for beta readers.  While this may seem like a good idea at first, there are some issues to be aware of before you go that route.

On the positive side, these readers will likely be knowledgeable enough about your genre that any potential feedback would be useful from that perspective, and many of them will also happily jump at the chance to read an early copy of your book for free, meaning you also won’t have to pay them.

However, that doesn’t mean that their advice will be without bias.  Similar to sending the book to a family member, an existing fan of your work may also feel some reluctance to be completely honest about any negative feedback they have, either intentionally (so as not to hurt your feelings) or unintentionally (due to the selection bias aspect – that is, the mere fact that they’re on your list or follow you on social means they already LIKE your writing and there may be issues that are okay with them that other readers would have a problem with, keeping you from being able to expand your audience beyond a specific group). 

And then there’s the fact that sending free copies of your book to fans that were likely already going to buy it costs you money, both in terms of lost sales and the rank boost you’d get from their purchases.

Professional beta readers or beta reader services

If you search the web you’ll likely find a variety of people offering to be beta readers, or offering beta reader services.  As with any service you buy or person you hire, they won’t all be created equally.  Each will offer different things and at different price points, so you need to carefully consider your needs before making a decision.  More importantly though, you should consider whether who you are about to hire is reliable – will you get what you pay for? 

In most cases, before you hire someone try to find feedback or reviews from others that have used them and make sure that those that have are generally happy with their results. 

Hidden Gems falls into this category. We’ve built our reputation off of providing quality and reliable services to authors for over 5 years, with a best in class ARC service that relies on word of mouth and repeat business to send out books for close to 4000 satisfied authors.  It is our goal to run our beta service in the same way, with the same level of quality and reliability that the author community has come to expect from us.

Our beta readers are invited to participate and compensated for the books that they provide feedback for, and the quality of their feedback is monitored to ensure that they are continuing to provide useful and detailed feedback for the books we send them.  Beta readers only sign up for the books that interest them, in genres they are familiar with, and there are no quotas on how many or few books they can read (although they are limited to one at a time so that they can dedicate their focus to that book before being offered another). 

Before launching our Beta Service, we ran through the process manually with some of those readers and authors that were interested in participating in a free trial to work out the system and provide feedback.  The response was overwhelmingly positive in regards to how we ran the service, with some suggestions for improvements that we were able to build into the system. The early feedback on the readers was then also used to determine which ones would be invited to participate after launch – but we will continue to grow those numbers and monitor them on an on-going basis for continued participation.

We monitor the beta readers by both periodically reviewing their questionnaire answers and by a process where authors are invited to rate the quality of the feedback submitted by each beta reader for their book.  On top of those ratings, authors can also choose to block a specific reader from getting future beta books from them, or even request that a reader be selected to get any future books they send out.