I Need Beta Readers For My Excruciatingly Long Fantasy Novel!

Back in November, I mentioned that I’d written the rough first draft of a massive generational fantasy novel – 311,000 words. In case you don’t do writer-speak, that’s literally bigger than all three books in the entire Flex trilogy stacked atop each other. And since I’ve taken three months to do minor edits, clarifying the worldbuilding, boiling down the prose, now it’s…

285,000 words of potentially-good book. And I need people to read it to help me make it a great book. So I’m looking for ten people to beta-read for me and give me feedback.

(Why seven to ten? Because I’d like four to five people’s feedback, and generally I find that you hit about 60% on getting beta readers to get back to you in time. Probably less with such a gigantic book in play.)

Now, y’all should know that touting yourself by saying “I’m really good at proofreading” pretty much excludes you from a lot of writers’ beta circles, including mine. I’m going to mangle all the prose anyway before I’m done, and assuming I sell it to a publisher when it’s done, we’ll have professional copyeditors and proofreaders sniffing this sucker like a hound dog. Flagging misspelled words and minor grammatical errors is, actually, a hindrance.

No, what I need are the sorts of people who can tell me four separate things cogently:

• The things that confuse you (“Why would $character do that?” or “Why did this technology not work this way?”)
• The things that throw you out of the story (“$Character wouldn’t do THAT!” or “Factually, that’s so wrong!”)
• The things that give you ass-creep (“I got bored here”)
• All the things that make you pump the fist (“This moment was truly awesome, and unless I tell you how awesome it is, you might cut this part out in edits”)

So if you think you can do all that in three months (or, preferably, way under that), do me a favor and email me at theferrett@gmail.com with the header “FERRETT, I WOULD LIKE TO BETA-READ YOUR EXCESSIVELY LONG NOVEL.” This comes with the dubious reward of being name-checked in the acknowledgements, if this behemoth eventually sells. I may get filled up on people, but if I do, I’ll put you on the list for the next revision.

And if you’re wondering where I’ve been, it’s like I said last time; I’ve got reasons I’ve been absent from social media and blogging, and eventually I’ll share why, with an apology. I owe you folks that much. But if you wanna email me to just say hello, well, fine, feel free to do that too.

(Comments turned off because those would carry the expectation of me responding. I’m near-entirely in lurk mode this days.)