Wanna Be a Beta Reader?

Last night, I was preparing book two of The Warrior Chronicles for ePublishing. I had uploaded the cover art the day before, the grammar check was finished, I put in a table of contents, complete with chapter hyperlinks. Then I uploaded the draft copy to see how the book will look on a Kindle and make sure the hyperlinks worked. Woohoo! Yay! Kudos to me! Book two is almost ready! Yee Haw! I clicked 'Save as Draft' so I could wake up this morning and download the mobi file and send it to my cadre of beta readers. They are quite a diverse group truth be told, so they make a great posse, because the book can been seen from so many different angles. There's Goose, the laid back husband and dad. He's a skateboarder and music junkie who loves a good space battle but wouldn't harm a bee if he could avoid it. He's nearby and I met him through an augmented reality game called "Ingress". That became mutual circling on Google Plus, which ultimately led to him being in my beta group. Then there is Shawn 2, the 'not-me' edition. A mild-mannered credit union guru during the work week, he turns into Bob Vila on his days off. This cat just decides "Oh, I think I will build an updated Taj Mahal today." and a few hours later he's posting pictures of mass pilgrimages to his latest creation. Now we come to Shawn's wife Mel. She spends a lot of her social time gaming and cooking. She posts pictures of what appears to delicious food, and is a general cut up. But her passion is animal rescue. The two of them have a house full of rescued animals. Birds, cats, and because they live in Florida, I think they have a gator or two. When she can't adopt an animal herself, she posts about it to find someone else to adopt it. This is near and dear to me, so she is one of my favorite people on the planet. Next there is my wife Lorelle. She tolerates science fiction on TV or the big screen, but it is not her reading choice. In fact, it's not even in the same solar system as her favorite genres. She wants a book with a nasty medical problem, a murder, and a love story. She give me the perspective of someone who isn't into the genre, meaning she makes sure I write in a way that non-Trekkies can follow both the story and the tech. Finally, my two 'special' beta readers, Tracy and Dawn. Tracy criticizes my grammar. Constantly. I've filed assault charges against her for it, there's a restraining order hearing coming up, and yet she still shows up, violating me with question marks and apostrophes and pretty much anything else she can use to abuse "Men Who Are Asses"™. Finally, there is Dawn. She is author who writes in several genres. She does so very poetically, and has a different target audience than I do. She's also been doing this a lot longer than I have and has a completely different style. One way to compare our work would be to picture a story as a museum: She takes you on a guided tour, describing every piece, filling your mind with images that almost put you in the story as an observer. I push you into the museum and lock you inside. You're on your own. Either you get my story or you don't, but I'm not walking you through it. I don't care. I don't write for you. As I have said before, I write to get the story out of my head. It's purely a mental health issue to me. You've just met the group of people I email my books to before they go live on Amazon. Except...remember how I said I clicked on 'Save as Draft'? Turns out I clicked on 'Save and Publish'. Fuck. When I woke up this morning I had an email from Amazon saying Warrior's Blood was live and on sale. In fact, after looking at the publishing reports I already had a few sales. So after cussing and discussing, I'm leaving it up there. That's right, folks. Warrior's Blood, book two of The Warrior Chronicles, is live and on sale. The whole world is my beta group.