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hrjI'm deep into revisions based on my beta-reader feedback now. (Still a few left to come in.) I try to help my readers by giving them discussion prompts as a jumping off point. One set is general: what did you like/not like? did anything in particular stand out? was there enough/too much backstory? etc. Another set (to be opened only after reading the story) is much more detailed, asking specific questions about specific characters and elements. It's not meant to be an exhaustive quiz, just a set of prompts. I did have a couple people comment that they were having flashbacks to English class exam questions, but I think most people found it more helpful than not.
So I've collated up all those questionnaire responses so I can look at the range of feedback for any one topic and decide how to proceed. But currently I'm going through the more detailed page-by-page feedback that several people provided (especially my special-topic readers).
The overall revision process goes something like this:
1. Address the detailed comments (which include some copy-editing stuff, although some of that will be covered in a later step).
2. Review the collated topical feedback and decide which issues need to be addressed, and how.
3. Do a complete read-through of my own and fix/adjust anything I notice (or that I've made notes about). Also: make a decision about whether to add time-indications to my chapter headings along with the POV indication. (A significant, although not overwhelming, number of beta-readers have indicated that it would be easier to follow the passage of time if given explicit clues. And those clues aren't always convenient to work into the beginning of the chapter itself.)
4. Export from Scrivener into Word for all further processing. (This is a tricky bifurcation point, because the current Scrivener file has interleaved chapters for both Mother of Souls and Floodtide. If I make any later changes that will affect timelines or intersections with the characters in the latter, then I'll need to update the Scrivener version.)
5. Run a fresh spell-check, which includes coming up with a list of non-English words and names for this specific books. (This is both a check on my consistency and a list I can provide to the publisher for reference.) Determine which non-English words get italicized and run a search to make sure I'm consistent. (Deciding what to italicize is not entirely straightforward. I suppose I could make things easy on myself by not doing it at all, which some authors prefer as a philosophical position.)
6. Run search-and-replace for a long list of formatting things: lingering double-spaces, the way that the word processor makes smart-quotes face the wrong way after an m-dash or ellipsis, trailing spaces before a paragraph break, double-dashes that haven't converted to m-dashes automatically, places where I've reflexively added a serial comma (which is against my publisher's house style), other house style issues that contradict my reflexes.
7. Export a pdf in a different font and layout than I usually use and do one last read-through on the iPad. (The different font/layout is to make things jump out visually. The pdf/iPad is so I'm reading it in a pdf-annotation interface which forces me to just highlight issues rather than pausing to fix them.)
8. If I have at least a week before the manuscript delivery date (probably not), send the result out to my second-round beta readers (a non-overlapping set with the first round) to spot any new issues that the edits have created. If I've run out of time, I'll simply include any second-round commentary when I get the editorial comments from my publisher.
9. Deliver the completed manuscript.
So I've collated up all those questionnaire responses so I can look at the range of feedback for any one topic and decide how to proceed. But currently I'm going through the more detailed page-by-page feedback that several people provided (especially my special-topic readers).
The overall revision process goes something like this:
1. Address the detailed comments (which include some copy-editing stuff, although some of that will be covered in a later step).
2. Review the collated topical feedback and decide which issues need to be addressed, and how.
3. Do a complete read-through of my own and fix/adjust anything I notice (or that I've made notes about). Also: make a decision about whether to add time-indications to my chapter headings along with the POV indication. (A significant, although not overwhelming, number of beta-readers have indicated that it would be easier to follow the passage of time if given explicit clues. And those clues aren't always convenient to work into the beginning of the chapter itself.)
4. Export from Scrivener into Word for all further processing. (This is a tricky bifurcation point, because the current Scrivener file has interleaved chapters for both Mother of Souls and Floodtide. If I make any later changes that will affect timelines or intersections with the characters in the latter, then I'll need to update the Scrivener version.)
5. Run a fresh spell-check, which includes coming up with a list of non-English words and names for this specific books. (This is both a check on my consistency and a list I can provide to the publisher for reference.) Determine which non-English words get italicized and run a search to make sure I'm consistent. (Deciding what to italicize is not entirely straightforward. I suppose I could make things easy on myself by not doing it at all, which some authors prefer as a philosophical position.)
6. Run search-and-replace for a long list of formatting things: lingering double-spaces, the way that the word processor makes smart-quotes face the wrong way after an m-dash or ellipsis, trailing spaces before a paragraph break, double-dashes that haven't converted to m-dashes automatically, places where I've reflexively added a serial comma (which is against my publisher's house style), other house style issues that contradict my reflexes.
7. Export a pdf in a different font and layout than I usually use and do one last read-through on the iPad. (The different font/layout is to make things jump out visually. The pdf/iPad is so I'm reading it in a pdf-annotation interface which forces me to just highlight issues rather than pausing to fix them.)
8. If I have at least a week before the manuscript delivery date (probably not), send the result out to my second-round beta readers (a non-overlapping set with the first round) to spot any new issues that the edits have created. If I've run out of time, I'll simply include any second-round commentary when I get the editorial comments from my publisher.
9. Deliver the completed manuscript.
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Date: 2016-06-07 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-07 07:45 pm (UTC)After the first novel, my preference has been to "try out" new beta readers on short fiction and then be more selective for the long works. Not every enthusiastic fan is suited to be a beta reader. (Feedback on a novel that consists of "I really liked this" isn't very useful.)
I'd developed a rule of thumb to expect only 50% of the volunteers to get comments back to me, but I seem to have improved that statistic significantly by keeping track of past performance and being selective in who I ask. (I keep a spreadsheet. Of course I keep a spreadsheet.)