This page is for those fanfic readers and writers who have asked for--or have been asked to be--beta readers but were unsure exactly what a beta reader does. I hope this website will help answer that question by using one of my stories as an example.

I wrote a pre-Buffy Giles story, "The Good Luck Song," in the fall of 1997, and sent it out to be beta-read one week before "Dark Age" aired. (Until "Dark Age," we knew very little about Giles' background, so I made up stuff for my story). I received comments from ten people. Some of the comments were short notes, while some ran for several pages. I have included all of them here, numbered in order from shortest to longest.

Plain draft - what the readers received.
Marked-up draft - the same draft, with links to specific comments.

Complete readers' comments (from shortest to longest):
Reader 1 - Reader 2 - Reader 3 - Reader 4 - Reader 5 - Reader 6 - Reader 7 - Reader 8 - Reader 9 - Reader 10

Links about Writing

Page created August 1998. Original material © Betsy Vera (bentley@umich.edu). Page background source: Jay Boersma. This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.