It’s been a interesting weekend. Hypericon was this weekend and even though I technically wasn’t a formal guest, I wound up moderating three panels anyways. Occupational hazard, especially when you’re also staff at the con.
On one of them, the topic of beta-readers and alpha-readers came up and I learned something interesting. Not everyone treats them the same way or as the same thing.
I grew up in fandom and my understanding has always been that a beta-reader is someone that helps you during your developmental phase before you hit the copy-edits and proofreading. Alpha-readers on the other hand are people that help you catch whatever last typos and kind of serve as a preliminary ARC reader.
Some of the people on the panel don’t have both or what they call a beta-reader is more like my understanding of an alpha-reader. Some of them will use betas during the copy-edit phase. Some people don’t use them at all, just working with their editor.
Please don’t misunderstand me, editors are fundamentally crucial to the writing for publication process. However, I have also found it helpful in a lot of cases with some of my writing to also use beta-readers – I find them really helpful.
So I thought I’d open up this question to any of the other creatives out there. What about you? Do you use beta-readers or alpha-readers? Some of them, both of them, or none? Leave your answers in the comments and let’s chat about this.
I think I was in the audience of the panel you mentioned. I’m a writer, and just completed the first draft of my first novel. It isn’t ready for a beta reader yet in my opinion, as my intention is to do a second draft and change / rearrange some plot elements. Once the 2nd draft is done, however, I think a few beta readers would be helpful. I thought alpha readers were like friends and family that saw it first before everyone else. But that was not the definition given on that panel, so what do I know? LOL
PS You also mentioned autism in one of the panels you were on. Any thoughts about autistic characters or writers – and how Alpha/Beta readers might help identify deficiencies in perception when writing ASD/NT characters, etc. ?
Hi! I hope you got something good out of it!
Honestly, definitions change all the time, depending on who you talk to, as you probably saw on the panel. So if that’s what works for you, then by all means, go for it! The only real rule for writing is to write, everything else is pretty negotiable.
I have a lot of thoughts about that actually – the best one that would apply to your specific question would be to find a sensitivity reader who is on the spectrum to look at the work and characters and see how authentically they come across. Or vice versa. The spectrum isn’t a monolith by any means, but it can be beneficial to make sure that you’re not straying into trope area with characterizations. I use them myself when I write about peoples and cultures and from perspectives that are different from mine own.