Quote:
Originally Posted by MichaelSullivan
Feedback from strangers is very different then feedback from people you know. Friends don't want to offend you and may not be regular readers of the genre. Unbiased feedback from people who read voraciously in your genre will be a pretty good judge of "ready for prime time." They don't need to be able to do a "formal analysis" they need to be able to answer a few basic questions..."Did you enjoy this?" "If you had bought it for $x would you consider it a good use of your time and money?" "Would you recommend it to a friend?" "Would you buy more books that I write?" You need "focus group" information - not a literary dissection of the work. [...]
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But unless you have a reasonable size group of beta readers such random feedback needs to be taken in the light of its random nature. Pick any book and you will find people that love it and people that hate it, sometimes for the same reasons. So, yes, random unknown readers may have their place, but the feedback received in that way is of an unpredictable nature.
When you suggested that many self-published books got out before they were ready for prime-time I - perhaps mistakenly - read this as speaking of those things that casual readers don't consciously look for, the sort of thing that a more formal analysis catches, the sort of thing that makes traditional publishing and development editors worthwhile, especially for new authors (but, of course, a new author never gets to see a development editor until they get past the front gate ... which brings us back to the appraisal thing*). If being ready for prime-time is just a matter of having received approval from some random readers, then I would say that quite a lot of self-published work fits this criteria.
ETA - Re your appraisal comments: mostly they reflect concerns that I have had, I don't disagree with them, but I decided to try it out anyway, to see what I get. There was a separate thread where more discussion on this topic belongs.