In my last post, I talked about the thrilling but uncanny experience of having someone else read your story for the first time. But what happens after that? When the dust has settled and your draft is back in your hands with hundreds of comments attached to it… what do you do with them all?

Hunter of Seals is off to a fresh pool of beta readers today after undergoing some light surgery after the last batch, so I thought today would be a perfect time to talk about what to do with reader feedback, particularly early reader feedback. Let’s dive in!

Know what you’re looking for

Ideally before you send your book out to readers (because some of them will inevitably ask about this) but definitely before you start to process the information they’ve given you, you should have some idea of what type of feedback you’re after. You may have specific questions, particularly if you’re a bit further on in the process, like whether a particular character’s arc is working or whether a particular plot twist makes sense. But if you’re on your very first round of feedback, you might be thinking, “I dunno – everything, I guess!” If that’s you, let me help you out there. As you read through the comments, ask yourself the following:

• Is this reader resonating with the main character? Are they picking up on the main traits I wanted this character to have? Are they sympathetic to the main character, even if they don’t relate to them?
• Do the motivations of all the characters appear to make sense to this person (for characters where you intend their motivation to make sense)? Are they startled or blindsided by any decisions you expected them to go along with (note: this is not the same thing as being surprised by a plot twist!)?
• Are they massively confused at any point where you are not okay with them being confused? Are they missing pieces of information on topics where you did not intend to keep them in the dark?
• Did the story feel like it was dragging at any points? Did any sections of the book feel rushed (chronically surprised readers can sometimes be a sign of this)? Did any changes in the characters feel like they happened too fast or too slow?

If you can’t tell the answer to any of these just from reading the feedback, ask directly. In fact, you should probably do that either way, unless the answer is painfully obvious (as in, they wrote “I got confused here, here, and here, and so-and-so’s motivation made no sense to me” without prompting).

These questions in particular are intended to draw out issues with things like voice, character motivation, information delivery, pacing, and plot structure – in other words, things that are foundational to your story and will be more annoying to change further down the line. Get to these issues as quickly as you can, and be ruthless in fixing them.

But… not too ruthless. Notice how I said “where you do/don’t intend X” or “where you are not okay with X” in a few places? That’s because there will naturally be places in many stories where information is meant to be hidden from the reader. If a reader indicates that any of these things were jarring to them, the fix isn’t to clarify it completely or scrap your entire plan, but to have the narrator flag it. If you show the main character being confused about something, the reader will know they’re in the clear to be happily confused as well, rather than scrambling to figure out what the main character knows that they don’t. This type of confusion draws people into a story, rather than making them feel alienated from it, and it’s a good thing. But you have to know where you want it to happen, and get comfortable with interrogating yourself about the difference between good and bad confusion in a reader’s feedback.

Knowing what you’re looking for will also help you decide which feedback to ditch entirely – and there will be some! You do not need to (and shouldn’t) act on every single comment you get. Some of it won’t align with your vision for the story. Some will be down to simple reader preference, like disliking a particular trope. Some of it could work perfectly well if you weren’t planning something else it would contradict with in a later book – information you have, but the readers don’t. This is how feedback works. Develop your own opinions of what the story needs so that you can make wise decisions about taking what works and leaving the rest.

Don’t take criticism from someone who can’t give you a compliment

This isn’t something I learned from beta reading, but something I learned from life, and a piece of advice that applies just about everywhere. If someone is incapable of or unwilling to point out the things you’re doing right, then you can’t trust them to point out the things you’re doing wrong – at least not with any discernment.

I’m not talking about effusive praise here. People should not need to kiss your feet to get you to hear their criticism. I mean that good readers, those who genuinely care about helping you improve your story, will point out things they liked as well as things they didn’t. And you should pay just as much attention to that praise as you would to a criticism! Particularly in early rounds of feedback, you’re going to be changing a lot of stuff, and throughout all that butchery, it’s critical that you know what not to change, as well as what the story could use a bit more of. That all comes from knowing what you’re doing right – from compliments.

If someone cannot point out a single thing they liked about your story – not so much as an “I like this line” or an “LOL” at a funny part – then there is a fundamental mismatch between you as a writer and them as a reader. Think of it like dating. It’s ok for the person you date to notice your flaws or point out things you do that bother them, but if your partner can’t point to a single thing they like about you, that’s a problem that can’t be talked through or compromised on, and any group chat worth its salt will tell you to dump them immediately. Beta reading is a similar process. The person who will be able to do the most for your story, who will give you the most valuable feedback of all, is the person who sees the potential in it and loves it enough to want to help you make it even better.

You don’t have to toss all the feedback from a Negative Nancy in the bin, and if you can stand to, I would still encourage you to read through every piece of feedback you get. But give their feedback much less weight, and cross-reference it with feedback from readers with more balanced takes before you implement any of it. The fewer people agree with a piece of feedback, the less valuable and important it is.

Process and implement feedback in stages

My process for incorporating my last round of reader feedback on Hunter of Seals looked like this:

1. Read through all comments. Resolve small issues like typos and easily fixable grammar mistakes, while transferring more involved comments (the ones I intend to act on only!) into comments in Scrivener. I didn’t copy the comments verbatim, but rather made notes of what needed to be fixed. This helped to transform more ambiguous feedback (“Why is she doing this?”) into actionable notes-to-self (“Motivation unclear in the next paragraph; add a moment of introspection here”). I invested the most time in this step, which set me up for very smooth sailing later on, as I didn’t have to waste a lot of time stopping to figure out how to change something or what to change.
2. Go through Scrivener chapter by chapter, fixing things and resolving them as I go. Occasionally in this part of the process, I reached out to the person who left some comment or other to ask a follow-up question about it.
3. Rest the draft for at least a day. Ideally longer, but I have no patience and waited exactly one day.
4. Print out the whole thing and mark it up. I didn’t let myself change anything electronically, I just made notes on the printed-out draft. I did my best to read through it as a reader, not as a writer, paying close attention to how things would hit if I did not have the divine knowledge of the omnipotent creator of my little fictional universe. In addition to noting mistakes and things to change, I also did a bit of analysis at this stage, making notes on character arcs I knew had confused some readers to check for overall consistency. Like in step 1, wherever I recommended a change at this stage, I spent the time to figure out what needed to change so that I wouldn’t have to think too hard about it in the next step. (This is much easier to do in reader mode than in writer mode.)
5. Go through and incorporate the changes I noted on paper into Scrivener. This was the fastest and easiest stage of the process, clocking in at a day and a half for a 100,000-word manuscript.
6. One final read-through to soothe my paranoia.

Breaking up the process into stages like this, rather than seeing a reader comment and rushing to fix it immediately and then calling it good, left me with a far more cohesive draft than I otherwise would have had. This is because at every stage, I was looking at the story from a bird’s eye view. Had I been trying to fix things at the same time as figuring out how to fix them, I would have ended up with things that worked for a particular scene, but not for the story as a whole, and likely with a lot of internal contradictions and inconsistencies to boot. I know this because that’s how I’ve done it in the past, and I switched to this more orderly, top-down method for a very good reason.

It also had the advantage of making the process just… a lot more manageable. Trying to fix everything all at once is exhausting, and most people agree you should break up editing into manageable chunks. The trick is to find ways to break up the work that keep you solution-focused and allow you to see the story as a whole. When all is said and done, you’ll have a story that hangs together much better for it, and you won’t be burned out at the end of it.

Happy editing!