You can also provide guidance for them to best help you remember beta readers aren’t necessarily conversant with writing craft and may not know what to say or what you’re looking for.
#ALTERNATIVES TO JEDIT PRO#
(Keeping in mind that their feedback may not always come with the constructive tact a good pro editor brings to an edit-grit your teeth and smile and thank them anyway they are still offering you their time and energy.) You can up your chances of getting useful insights by choosing beta readers who are widely read, ideally in your genre, and letting them know their genuine, unvarnished impressions are what will be most useful to you. Not all lay readers can articulate specifically what they did or didn’t like about a story or why, and sometimes those close to you may be reluctant to offer anything but praise, which may be delightful to hear but isn’t necessarily helpful or actionable. On the “cons” side, your beta readers may or may not be the ideal or target audience for your story, and they may or may not offer useful feedback.
#ALTERNATIVES TO JEDIT TRIAL#
The “pros” are that this is usually free (though a small thank-you token for their time and effort, like a coffee-shop gift card, is always classy and appreciated), and offers you a trial run of your story with your end users: readers. (Early cave dwellers no doubt summoned fellow clan members to offer first impressions as they perfected their petroglyphs.)
#ALTERNATIVES TO JEDIT HOW TO#
That lets you learn to approach your own stories more objectively and analytically as well, and how to spot possible areas of weakness.īut these services are a very recent entry in a time-honored process of soliciting lay readers who serve as an author’s “test audiences”-often friends and acquaintances willing to simply read it like a reader and offer their opinions. As authors we’re often “filling in the blanks”-we see what we meant to say, not what we actually said-which is what can make editing ourselves so hard in the first place.īut when offering critiques for your partner or group, you get to practice evaluating a manuscript from the 30,000-foot view an editor brings to it. Often even more helpful is the real, hidden benefit of these relationships: that they offer you the opportunity to edit others’ work. In the “pro” column, you get that outside perspective you need to show you how well your intentions are coming across on the page-and from readers who, as authors themselves, may have enough grounding in craft to know what makes story work and how to pinpoint areas that might need shoring up. Trading edits with other writers can be invaluable for you as an author-but it also comes with some risks and caveats. Getting Outside Input Critique groups/partners.
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