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.