Beta/Proofreading

I actually wrote a blog post about this here, but essentially, beta reading is getting a reader’s perspective on your manuscript, usually after you’ve already done some editing and revising. A beta reader isn’t really an ‘editor’, but can provide you with some insights, feedback and suggestions which can help with revisions, and give you an overall idea of how readers might react to your book. I always try to help out as much as I can with whatever you need help with – often, authors will give me specific areas to focus on or a set of questions to answer after reading.

You actually don’t have to – there are a number of ways to get beta reading services for free. You can ask family and friends to give your book a read, or try a manuscript swap with another author. If you go to a virtual or in-person writers’ group, then you can often get feedback and critique there too. Online writing communities, such as The Writers’ Factory on Discord, can also be helpful.

The issue that you might run into with this is consistency. Often, authors come to me with deadlines approaching, which is where my fixed delivery times can be really helpful. If you’re asking a friend for a favour, then it can be a little more difficult to get your manuscript returned within a strict deadline. Reading an entire manuscript is often a big ask for someone who isn’t getting anything in return, and you might end up with vague – or biased – feedback. Manuscript swaps are a good remedy for this, unless you also have the problem of not having the time to go through someone else’s manuscript.

When you come to me, you’re trusting your manuscript with someone who spends a lot of his time dedicated to beta reading – to be transparent, it’s one of my main sources of income, and fits really well around my schedule as a current MA student. You also have the security of going through the Fiverr platform, so the deadline and expectations are set out clearly and you have Fiverr Support as a third party in case anything doesn’t go right.

To put it simply – nope! To be honest, one of my biggest fears while beta reading is that I’m going to run into an author who responds negatively to the criticisms and feedback that I bring to them, because I’m constructive, but I’m not going to just tell you that everything was amazing. Unless you bring me a 100% perfect manuscript, of course, but that hasn’t happened yet! I’ve collected some of my reviews on this page, which can also be viewed on the gig page on Fiverr, and you might notice that something a lot of authors bring up is my honesty and how helpful my suggestions are. I don’t shy away from telling you what doesn’t seem to be working, and providing some suggestions on adjusting things too!

I’m bringing a lifelong passion for reading and three years of a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing (which I graduated from with a First!) to your manuscript, alongside the experience of being an author myself, as you can see if you poke around on this website a little bit. Plus, through my time spent beta reading, I’ve been exposed to a whole range of literature that I might not have considered previously, which has really broadened my reading palette, so to speak.

If you come to me with a genre I’ve never encountered before, I will be up-front and mention this to you, but I’ve been able to provide helpful feedback on everything from contemporary romance to a non-fiction guide to getting your first puppy, and a whole range of fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction, children’s fiction, off-the-walls satire and… Well, sometimes it makes my head spin a bit to look back and remember everything I’ve read, but it’s safe to say that I’ve read widely!

I think there are a number of crucial points to think about when considering using AI for beta reading. The first, and perhaps most important, is that many AI models will have character/word limits – I can only imagine how tedious feeding your manuscript in chapter-by-chapter, or even section-by-section, might be. It might be quite difficult for an AI to give an overall impression of your novel – I briefly worked on training various AI models, and something they can struggle with, which you might notice yourself, is their memory and recollection of prior turns in conversations.

But let’s keep going with this scenario. You’ve found an AI that you’ve been able to give your entire, as-of-yet unpublished book to. At this point, as a fellow author, I would be slightly concerned. AI models are trained off of data, which could possibly include your own conversations with it – check the terms and conditions (or equivalent) of whichever AI you’re using carefully. Personally, I wouldn’t want to take even the slightest risk with my unseen writing being used by an AI to create more writing, and there can be some uncertainty around this.

Still, in our hypothetical scenario, you’ve found an AI model that won’t use your data in any way, except for this conversation. However, a beta reader is there to give you a potential reader’s view of the book in its current state. Your readers are human – they’re not AI. AI can create paragraphs of feedback based on other feedback that it has read, and can link that to the text you’ve given it, but it’s not a human reaction to your work, just an imitation. We’ve already heard of the mess that AI models can create from ‘hallucinating’ links and sources that don’t exist, but how do you fact-check a ‘human’ reaction to the steamy scene on page 121 of your romance novel? Or the careful build-up of clues and hints to the thrilling conclusion of your crime novel? It seems like more of a headache than it’s worth.

I am of the – perhaps hopeful – opinion that if you’re here, reading this, you’re seeking helpful, human feedback on your book, whether fiction or non-fiction. AI might seem like a quicker and easier solution, but considering all of the potential issues, it seems like a safer bet to go with a trusted, human beta reader. Unless you happen to be writing for an audience of AI models – perhaps a spicy Chat GPT/Dall-E romance? – in which case, go right ahead!

I’ve had a couple of requests about this, so I’ve put together a template of my ‘standard’ Reader Report, which shows you my typical headings and what usually goes under them. Keep in mind that I’m open to customising this for orders – and often do – depending on what sort of areas come up in my notes and whether you have any specific instructions for me. As an example, if you have a list of ten questions for me, I can incorporate those questions into my headings and include a general section for any of my notes that don’t fit into your questions. But if you’d like to see the template, you can download it below.

As you’ll see on the Fiverr page, I include ‘proofreading’ and a ‘line edit’. Essentially, I will go through your manuscript line-by-line, checking for any errors – typos, spacing or punctuation issues, and also grammar and syntax. I use Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature by default, so I will go through and suggest edits, and use comments if I’m not sure about something – for example, if there’s a typo where multiple words could possibly fit in that sentence, so it’s not obvious which word it’s meant to be. I won’t go through changing everything willy-nilly, if you’ll excuse the turn of phrase, as I understand the importance of preserving your unique writer’s voice, but I will also adhere to any instructions you give me.

As I mentioned in the beta reading section, I do have a First Class BA English Literature with Creative Writing degree, and I have spent years honing my writing and editing skills. However, I do not have a formal proofreading qualification, and as such, my rates reflect this; they’re significantly lower than the CIEP (Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading) recommended minimum hourly rate of £29.85, and Reedsy‘s average of $15.80 per 1,000 words (which would skyrocket our 60,000-word manuscript example to $948).

In part, I’ve kept them low for a similar reason as to why I keep all of the eBook versions of my books free: accessibility. As a fellow author who doesn’t have that much money to drop on proofreading costs (and has often recruited friends and my significant other to fill the gap, with differing levels of success), I want you to be able to access my services if you need to, without a prohibitively high price point.

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with having Grammarly whirring away in the background while you’re writing – when I’m using Google Docs, I have it on myself, although sometimes I have to turn it off when it makes longer documents start to lag. The issue that I often run into with Grammarly, which I suspect you may too, is that I sometimes feel like I’m in a battle against its suggestions, trying to pick out what’s actually helpful and what’s just something stylistic that it happens to not like. Worse still is when it doesn’t pick up on something that I catch when manually proofreading – my view is that these programs aren’t at the stage where you can 100% trust them yet, and they often have some rather annoying robotic opinions on writing style.

Instead of framing it as an ‘instead’ question, I would consider this: why not use both? To make sure your readers are receiving the most polished, error-free book possible, you can have a check-over with Grammarly (or any other similar tool) before handing the manuscript over to a proofreader to catch anything that’s slipped through the cracks. Considering Grammarly has a perfectly fine free version, it seems like a win-win in my eyes.

Of course, there’s also the relatively new phenomenon of feeding your manuscript into an AI and having it be your proofreader. All I can say to that is, as someone who briefly worked on training some of these AI models, I’m not sure how far I would trust them compared to a human proofreader – and without getting myself into any sort of legal hot water, I would definitely err on the side of caution when entrusting my original work to any program that is trained off of a large number of texts. Definitely give the terms of condition (or similar) a good read-through, in any case, before going down that route.