Okay, this is overdue, but it’s finally done: I’ve gotten as much polishing done as I can on the second draft of Queen of Souls. I have arranged with the editor who worked on the Rebels of Adalonia books for her to do a freelance edit pass on this manuscript, and I’ve agreed to hand this off to her on 4/3.
Which means that if anybody is available for beta reading, I need you NOW!
If you’re up for it, this is what I need from you.
I have a full manuscript file in Microsoft Word .docx format. (By request, I can also save out to .doc or .rtf format, but will stick with .docx unless I hear otherwise.)
If you can beta read the manuscript, I need you do the following things:
- Email me directly, PM me, or drop a comment on this post and let me know how I can send you a copy of the file. Let me know if you need .doc or .rtf, as well.
- I will send you a copy of the file. Please load this into Word, or into any other word processor you have available that supports Office-style change tracking and comments.
- Go down through the file and drop a comment on anything you would like to bring to my attention.
- Send the file back to me and I’ll merge it with my master copy, and evaluate which changes I want to take before I hand the file off to my editor.
(In the past, I have let people send me comments in a variety of ways. However, I found this very difficult to organize and keep track of. In the name of speed and of my sanity, I’m asking that if you want to do a serious beta pass on this thing for me, do please use change tracking in Word or a similar editor. It’ll make things a LOT easier for me in the end and I thank you in advance.)
What kinds of reading I need done:
- Basic proofreading. If you see a typo, call it out.
- If you have any level of geekery about Greek mythology and you see something I screwed up, definitely call that out. I tried to do a lot of checking against theoi.com as my source of mythological data, but it’s certainly plausible that I might have screwed something up.
- Any obvious general continuity errors or things that don’t make any logical sense to you as a reader.
Keep in mind that I am paying to have this book professionally edited, and this is the same editor who did the Rebels books for me–and so I’ll be asking her to do developmental-level edits for me as well as copyedit-level changes. So I don’t need people to go over this manuscript in huge detail, that’s what I’m paying Deb for!
But that said, do as much as you feel like you have time for. If you just want to read over the manuscript and give me an overall thumbs up or thumbs down, even that is valuable too! Just, as I said above, if you do have comments you want to make, again, use change tracking.
As with previous books, I will be giving credit to all beta readers in the Acknowledgements.
Any questions, talk to me!
