[Gudy]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Nope, I'm telling you that in general, you don't exist. How many of you do you think there are? Firstly, you're a writer yourself, so you're willing to beta-read other writers, in order to earn that reciprocity. Secondly, you have fans. I don't think it takes the brain cells of Oppenheimer to take one glance at Smashwords, or Amazon, etc., to see that most self-published authors don't; most are desperate for something as simple as a single review, much less a beta-reader. You're active on this forum, as an author--not merely the "pimp my book" forum--which makes you unusual in the first place.

Minor but important correction: I am not, repeat NOT, an author. When I talk about "what it looks from my end" I am talking about the perspective of someone who reads voraciously and passionately and who has been recruited by an author he loves to be a beta/proof reader. And as I said, I concede that finding good beta readers may be nontrivial in certain circumstances, especially for a first time author without a fan base to recruit from. But most mid-list authors do actually have some kind of readership or fan base, else they wouldn't be mid-list authors but rank, first time amateurs.

Originally Posted by Hitch

As we're talking about books in quantity, I think it would be only fair for you to admit that you or your equivalent mightn't be sitting on every street-corner for the average first- or second-time writer.

Sure. In this, as in everything including critique groups, Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) applies. Heck, you often need to apply it two or three times in a row to get to the actual ratio of crap to non-crap.

Originally Posted by Hitch

I guess my question to you would be: would you be a beta-reader if you didn't have skin in the game? You might think that as a (patently) vociferous reader, you would be...but I suspect that, as you mentioned, for the average author that requires fans...which, IMHO, gets us back to square one, which is: producing a clean, edited, proofed book that will garner fans in the first instance. Chicken-egg-chicken-egg.....

In a way, yes. As mentioned above, I am not an author, so my motivation as a reader is essentially to help making the books of the author I am beta reading for the best they can be.

So maybe my view of this process is as skewed as yours, except in a different direction, but why would you need to start out with a clean, edited, proofed book to garner those fans? Why not, as "my" author did, start off with publishing your work(s), be they short stories or a first novel, in installments on your web site, trying to garner some readership by buying advertising on web sites that host stories similar to yours and build it up from there? OK, so maybe those first stories you published on your site will never exist as an actual book due to the first publication issue, and maybe they contain an error or two, but so what? What you need to do as an author is convince people that you're worth their time and money. If you're very lucky indeed, you can get a big publisher and their marketing machinery to do the convincing. But for most authors that will never happen and the only one who can convince anyone of anything is the author, and the only means by which to do so is their writing, so not putting it out there more than likely won't get you anywhere, with slush piles being as big as they are.

The thing to keep in mind in all this, though, is the economics of the whole situation: Given how many books are bought each year and how many new books are published each year, it is patently impossible for anyone but a very small minority of authors to ever "make it". Most won't. Deservedly so in the vast majority of cases. But even a great number of really good authors won't make it, sadly, because they never quite get enough of their ducks in a row to garner the readership and attention base that would allow them to become successful. And in that sense you are absolutely right: you need a modicum of success to get those beta readers from your fan base or fellow authors. With said success being as rare as it is (and must of necessity be given the numbers involved) a great many authors will not ever find their betas. On the other hand, if you are a mid-list author with a couple thousand readers and at least a basic grasp of the idea that you could shape your readership into a community and potential resource for you, you should be able to find a handful of beta readers.

Originally Posted by Hitch

As previously mentioned: JMHO.

Same here. :-)