Why Relatives Should Not Be Beta Readers

I am incapable of turning down anyone who wants to read my novel, but I’ve gotta say, there are reasons to not use relatives as beta readers.

1. You know they don’t really want to read it, would never pick it up in a book store, and are only reading it to be “nice.”

2. Probably because of #1, they make a lot of vague comments, “I liked it”, “Hey, not too bad!” and my favorite, “Wow, so all these pages are part of the book? I can hardly write ten pages, ha ha. It’s so long, you must be a really good writer.”

3. They don’t know your genre. “Well, it’s fantasy, right, so [the characters] can just use magic at the end to fix everything.” “Maybe you should be different from all those other novels and have your heros NOT win in the end.” “How about the hero cheats on the heroine and she dumps him.”

4. Some of them don’t know the English language. Sometimes “had had” is NOT a typo.

5. Some of them are former English teachers. In fiction, sentence fragments ARE okay, if they are deliberate.

6. They don’t grasp historical context or world-building. “This word ‘doublet’ sounds weird, maybe it would be more clear if you just called it, ‘jacket.'” “This king is really mean to his slaves. I don’t think he’d stay in power if he was so mean.”

Writing the Breakout Novel

I’m going light on blogging while I:

A) Catch up on beta reading — which is in itself quite illuminating. So often I’ll catch some problem, say, overwriting, and realize, damn, I do this too.

B) At the same time, I’m using responses from my beta readers and the Donald Maass Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook to edit my Dindi story. (Yes, again. It still has not compelled five agents to scramble over themselves to represent it, so clearly it still needs work.) I’ve read the Maass book by the same name, but never read the workbook before. Has anyone else gone through it?

C) Beyond mere editing, I’m still brainstorming like mad to figure out how to fig-leaf the ginormous plot hole in the middle of my series. This is not even something caught by my beta readers, because they wouldn’t be able to see it until a few more books into the series. But I believe that through the mystical power of the Great Unconscious, they can already sense the Black Plothole sucking all life from the story, even this far away from the event horizon.