Find them where readers of your genre already gather — not where writers gather. Ask three to five. Give them a deadline and a short list of specific questions. The difference between useless feedback and useful feedback is almost entirely the brief, not the reader.
How to find beta readers (and brief them so the feedback is usable)
The brief that makes feedback usable
Send these instead of 'let me know what you think'. Tick what applies to your book; we'll email the formatted version.
- At the end of chapter three, what did you think the book was about?
- Where did you stop reading, and what were you doing when you picked it up again?
- Was there anywhere you skimmed? Be specific — page or chapter.
- Which character would you cut? Which would you give more of?
- At the halfway point, what did you think would happen next?
- Was there a moment you stopped believing someone's decision?
- Did anything confuse you that you had to reread?
- If you hadn't promised me, would you have finished it?
- Who would you recommend this to? Be specific about the person.
- What was the last book you read that this reminded you of?
- Was the ending earned, or did it arrive?
- What did you expect from the title and cover that you didn't get?
The beta reader brief, as a printable template
Pick the questions that fit your book and we'll email you a formatted brief, plus a short covering note you can copy into the email to your readers.
Look where readers are, not where writers are
The most common mistake is recruiting from writing communities. Writers read like writers — they notice craft, and they tell you about craft. What you need is someone who reads your genre for pleasure and will put a book down without guilt.
The reliable free sources, roughly in order of how well they work:
Genre communities. Subreddits, Goodreads groups, Facebook groups organised around a genre rather than around writing. Read the rules; most have a specific thread or day for this and will remove you otherwise.
Your own newsletter or social following, however small. Forty people who chose to hear from you contains three excellent beta readers. Ask publicly and let them self-select — the ones who volunteer read faster than the ones you nominate.
Local libraries and writing circles. Undervalued, and disproportionately useful for memoir, local history and anything with a regional setting.
Critique swaps. You read theirs, they read yours. Slowest, most reciprocal, and the source most likely to produce a long-term reading relationship — which is worth more than any single round of feedback.
Marketplaces. £50–£200 a reader. What you're buying is a deadline.
How many, and how to stagger them
Three to five per round, in two rounds rather than one. Send to two readers first. If both trip on the same thing, fix it before the other three see it — otherwise you will get five reports about a problem you already know about, and you will have burned five first impressions on a draft you could have improved in a fortnight.
Expect a third to drop out. Recruit accordingly, and be genuinely gracious about it: a reader who goes quiet has usually had a hard month, not a hard time with your book.
The brief is the whole job
'Let me know what you think' produces 'I loved it, well done'. Not because your readers are being polite — though they are — but because you gave them no idea what would help.
A good brief does three things. It asks about experience, not quality: where did you stop, not was it good. It asks at fixed points, so you can compare readers to each other. And it gives permission to be unkind, explicitly and in writing, because most people need to be told twice.
Keep it to a page. Twelve questions is plenty; twenty-two is the full menu to choose from, not a form to send.
What to do with contradictory feedback
You will get contradictions, and this is where most authors lose their nerve.
The rule: count the symptom, ignore the prescription. If three readers say chapter nine dragged and each proposes a different fix, believe the drag and ignore all three fixes. If one reader hated something two readers loved, you have found the thing that makes your book specific — usually keep it, and make it more so.
Only act on a single reader's note when it names something you already suspected at three in the morning.
How Your Book Pro fits into this
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
For this stage there are two things worth knowing. Beta Reader runs your manuscript past three distinct reader types and gives you the structural report in minutes rather than weeks — which means you can clear the obvious problems before you send it to the five people who will only read it once. It costs 500 credits and every account starts with 1,000 free ones.
And when the real reports come back, Detailed Editorial Feedback is the tool that turns a pile of contradictory reactions into a diagnosis: what the symptoms have in common, and which chapter is actually causing them.
What we cannot do is tell you whether someone would have bought it. That is the one thing only a real reader in your real audience can answer, and it is why you should still send it to five of them.
Saying thank you properly
Name them in the acknowledgements, ask first, and send them the finished book in the format they read in. Offer to read theirs. A beta reader who felt useful will read your next book, and by your third book the readers you kept are worth more than any service you could buy.
Run a beta read now
Upload a manuscript written anywhere
Email me the briefQuestions people ask
- How long should I give beta readers?
- Four weeks for a full-length book, with a specific date, and a light reminder at two weeks. Open-ended requests are never completed.
- What format should I send?
- Ask each reader. Most want an ePub or a PDF on a phone or e-reader; some want a Word file to comment in. Send it the way they normally read, or they will read less of it.
- Should I fix things as feedback arrives?
- No. Collect all the reports before you change anything, or you will rewrite the book underneath your readers and lose the ability to compare their reactions.
- What if the feedback is devastating?
- Wait a week before you decide anything. Almost every author's first reaction to a hard beta round is that the book is broken, and almost every book that got that reaction was two structural fixes away from working.
- Should I use an NDA?
- Almost never. It signals distrust, cuts your reader pool, and manuscript theft is vanishingly rare. Keep a dated copy of your file; that is the protection that matters.