In the Indie Book world, there are a lot of roles/responsibilities that readers take on to support authors.You can share posts, like pages, sign up to be a beta or an ARC reader, pimp their promotions, join fan pages, share posts, like everything – did I mention share posts?! An Indie author can not be an indie author without readers. I mean, I guess they could, but why?
Anyway, I have really gotten to see how a lot of sides work in the past 3 months. I enjoy being an active reader. Yes, sometimes it’s hard; but you’re getting paid in free books and interacting with a great group of people (for the most part), so I find it worth it. I am a beta reader for a couple of authors. I’ve done tons of ARC’s – and there are email lists to sign up for where you can do nothing but read and review ARC’s for authors. The difference between Beta and ARC reading is really just the amount of feedback given. If I read a beta book, I take notes while I’m reading and then email or pm the author and let them know what I like, what I don’t like, what doesn’t make sense, and what works really well! An ARC reading is just reading the book – usually about a week before it comes out – and writing a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or a blog once it goes live. The beta I just finished reading the first go-round of, was done totally different than anything I’ve done before.
The author – hereafter known as Penny- gave us the book link in google docs, so we could read and make notes for changes. For the most part, I really really liked that format. There were only a couple of PMs, but mainly, just notes in the document. Have you ever been reading a book and were like “Damn, that is fantastic!” or “Fuck that, no!”? We all have! With this format, it was just clicking on the ‘add comment’ button and typing that shit in. That part was great – except for I’m an oxford comma user and this author isn’t, so I legit added like 600 commas to her book. hahahaha The downside of this was that google docs does not work well on my phone, so the 500 pages had to be read on my computer. It took me almost 2 weeks of every time I was sitting at my computer reading some of it. It’s a good thing I liked the book, or I would have dropped that shit with a quickness. Once she’s ready with a hard roll, I can’t wait to do the review of this book. Penny may be tired of me tho, because I don’t really hold back, and I’m a little scared I won’t get the 2nd book and find out what the cliffhanger of the 1st turns into. Penny, don’t leave me now!
Reviewing Life 