I recently wrote a post about waiting for beta readers — I’d found a beta reader for my BDSM romance novel and I had to wait for her to get through it. Well, she did, and she had praise for it. She also found some factual errors in the fitness/weightlifting parts of the book, which is exactly why I chose her. I now need to go through the book and make some changes, including one that will directly affect one of the climaxes. I think I know what I’m going to do, although I’m not sure if it’ll make sense to anyone who knows anything about that world. 

I’m also working on a short-story collection under a different pen name, which I have mentioned in the past few weeks. There’s one story I’m particularly proud of, and a friend of mine from the spanko community agreed to read it. He had some great feedback; it was exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. He didn’t just tell me what he liked; he also picked apart things that didn’t make sense to him. 

So I asked him if he’d like to do the same for the other nine stories in the collection. He said he didn’t know when he’d be able to get to them, but that he would love to. I told him that I wasn’t planning to publish the book until early next year, so if he could get to them by, say, November, that would be plenty of time. He agreed, and I sent him the stories. 

Now I’m waiting again. 

At this point I have other books to work on — I have to get the Lizzie book wrapped up and published, and I have another book under another pen name that’s almost ready to be typeset (more about that one tomorrow). Plus I can edit the aforementioned BDSM romance, and maybe find another beta reader for it, and I also really ought to do something with the GWWA novel. So it’s not like I don’t have other things to do. But I get antsy when I’m waiting for my beta readers; I want to hear what they have to say so I can improve my writing and make it more publishable. 

I suppose I could pay for a beta reader, but the problem is that a lot of the ones you find on Fiverr these days just feed the book into AI and then charge you for the results. I could do that myself if I really wanted to, but I want humans to read the book and tell me their thoughts and feelings. AI doesn’t have feelings (yet). I also don’t have a lot of spending money, so I don’t want to spend $200-$500 on someone who guarantees a human read just so I can publish a book that might sell twenty copies. (I’m a realist. I know how many books I do and don’t sell.)

The waiting is the hardest part, but it’s what I’ve sentenced myself to do. I guess my only hope is that my spanko friend reads fast because he gets into the stories and wants to know what happens. If he does that, it’ll almost be an even better compliment than anything he could put into the commentary, because it’ll mean the stories pulled him along and kept him interested. 

I guess we’ll see.