I almost titled this “Betatron” but I didn’t think a lot of you would get a reference to a forty year old Micronauts toy that wasn’t super-popular then.

Or maybe a couple of you would. Who knows. Anyway…

Some of you may have seen me tweet about finishing a draft of my new bookthe other day. It’s the second, for those who care—my “fill in all the holes” pass. Which means by the time you read this I’ll already be deep into my hacking and slashing draft. And then… other people will finally see it.

Which is kinda what I wanted to talk about.

Beta readers have come up here a couple of times, and we’ve talked about them at the Writers Coffeehouse (before the plague year forced us to go digital with it). But we’ve never really talked much about how to choose beta readers. What I want to be looking for, what I’ll need from them, and so on.

I’ve actually asked three new people to be beta readers for me on this book. For a few different reasons. And  I thought it might be worth going over some of these reasons.

So… what do I look for in a beta reader?

(aside from a high level of beta-particle absorption…?)

Knowledge – All of my beta readers have something they’re better than me at. It might be a specific aspect of their background, their education, or a point of view I just can’t emulate, but there’s always something they know that I don’t. There’s a specific reason I want this person to read this manuscript before I send it off to my agent or an editor.

On a related note, these are also people I know understand why I’m asking them to look at this. They know what I’m hoping to hear (or not hear) from them. And they understand the format I’d like to get these notes back in. When I ask my biochemist friend to read this, he should understand I’m hoping he’ll catch any glaring errors in biochemistry, and maybe also related dialogue and actions. It doesn’t help me if I ask a lawyer I know to beta-read my courtroom drama and she says “I didn’t see any typos, except for a couple glaring ones in the last third of the manuscript.”

Patience – Before I start sending a manuscript off, I double check with folks to make sure they’ve actually got time for this right now. They might be able to squeeze in reading a book right now, but do they actually have room in their schedule to go through my manuscript (possibly twice) with a critical eye? I want to make sure they’re going to be able to consider and absorb things, not just skim through and say “I liked it.”

There’s also a personal thing to this. I need to be aware of what people like so I can at least have an early sense of how they’ll (hopefully) respond to this. If Phoebe really loathes mysteries, I don’t want to give her a book with a strong mystery element and ask her what she thinks. She’s going to have a lot more patience for a story with a strong sci-fi aspect.

This is important because…

(a chime rings, signaling you to turn the page)

The Micro and Macro– This is one of the ones were it’s especially important to have a really good sense of my readers. When it comes to criticism, any book is going to have two aspects to it. There’s the big picture stuff—did you like it? Did the twist make sense? Was Wakko’s overall motivation believable? Then there’s the smaller stuff—does this line of dialogue work? Does this description stand out? Is this action too detailed?

The catch is, there are things that can look wrong or odd on the small scale, but it turns out they’re correct when we look at the big picture. If I say “Hitler died in 1964,” that’s wrong. But if I say that in a sci-fi, secret-history story, maybe there’s something to it.

I don’t want a beta reader who’s only going to focus on the micro or the macro, and not how they combine to make a good book. I don’t want them to have the book for a month and then just say “This was pretty good overall,” and I also don’t want to get back 300 marked-up pages where they marked something as wrong that’s explained three paragraphs later.

Honesty – I don’t think I’ve ever used a beta reader that I’ve known for less than two years. Most of them I’ve known for more than five, and about half of them for fifteen or more. And by “known” I mean hung out with, had long one-on-one discussions with, probably shared a meal or two, maybe a drink. I know them and they know me.

More importantly, they know me well enough to be honest with me. They’re not scared of accidentally hurting my feelings. They’ll tell me what I need to hear, even if it’s not pleasant.

At the same time, I’m not some faceless internet account they’re going to aim a firehose of criticism at. Some folks like to crow how they’re “just being brutally honest,” when the truth is they just like tearing things apart.

Trust—My last point about beta-readers ties to the previous one, but actually falls on us, the writers. Now that I’ve carefully selected these well-qualified people to read my manuscript… am I going to listen to them? Do I actually trust their knowledge and opinions, or am I just going to brush their criticism aside because I don’t like it?

And that’s the kind of stuff I look for in a beta reader. You may have a few special considerations of your own, depending on your own editing methods or the particular piece you’re working on. And that’s all fine—it’s what works for you.

But if this is the first time you’re ever gone hunting for beta readers and you’re not quite sure what their footprints look like… well, maybe some of this will help get you on the right track.

Next time on the ranty blog… I got a question about genre, and that’s always fun to talk about. And the week after that is (technically) San Diego Comic Con weekend, so there may be some fun to be had.

Until then, go write.

Normally I try to update the FAQ every six months or so. Partly for you, partly for me. To be honest, it’s tough for me to keep track of all the stuff going on (and potentially going on) as far as sales, releases, formats, options, and adaptations. Even more so when you figure these past few months time has become less of an absolute, often slowing to a crawl and stretching on and on and on when in fact it’s only Wednesday.

And, well, that particular effect has really intensified, hasn’t it? With the global pandemic and possibly months at home, not to mention the looming threat of murder hornets, I think a lot of us have either completely lost track of time or become all-too-painfully aware of it. I know I spent pretty much all of March and maybe the first week of April doomsurfing. Like, all the time. I didn’t mean to, or really want to, but that’s how every day ended up going.

But even with all that, I figured it might be worth doing a quick catch-up. I mean, I think we’d all enjoy something happening pretty much how and when it’s supposed to, right? Something working the way it’s supposed to? Novel idea, right?

So here’s me scribbling up answers to some of the most common questions I’ve gotten lately. Then when people ask me those questions (again!)—or when their teacher says “hey, hunt down an author on social media and ask them a bunch of questions”—I can say “hey, check out the FAQ I’ve pinned all over the place!”

Or maybe I won’t say it, cause at this point… I mean, there’s a current FAQ pinned right at the top of the page, several older versions of it, this blog, and several dozen interviews floating around the web. Plus I wrote a bunch of books, and it’s kind of amazing how often the answers are in the books.

Do your research, people! Be the mad scientist you always wanted to be when you were little!

If all goes well, the ebook for Terminus should be out just in time for San Diego Comic Con. Hahahaaaaaaaaa… sad laugh. More on that below.

Terminus should hopefully be out as an ebook by the end of July, barring any weirdness. I’m also looking at bringing one or two other things (at least) to ebook that have been kinda out of wider circulation for a bit. I’d hoped to have them done about… well, now, but then, again, everything kinda collapsed and time ceased to have meaning.

Past that… I’m just finishing up a book that kinda came out of nowhere, fortunately at a time when I could devote a lot of attention to it. It probably would’ve gone faster, but… again,  doomsurfing. As you’re reading this, odds are my agent’s reading that.

And I’ve got a big idea I might be pitching him. Like, silly-wildly big. Maybe we’ll be talking more about that in another six or seven months.

2) So, wait, no paper version of Terminus?
No. There’s a couple of different reasons for it, and they involve assorted business and PR things I’d rather not get into (okay, fine, I’ll get into it). There’s still a chance both books may still become available if there’s a big demand for them (feel free to tell Crown Publishing you want to read them in print and would buy half a dozen copies), but for the moment Terminus (and Dead Moon) are only going to be ebook and audio. Sorry.

Threshold is the umbrella label for the shared “cosmic horror” universe I unknowingly began eight years ago with 14. There are some books that form a more linear story, a “series” if you will, and some that stand alone. A lot of Marvel movies are part of the direct Avengers through-line, but some—like Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 or Thor: Ragnarok—are just set in the MCU. You can enjoy them without knowing a lot of the other movies (you’ll just catch a few more nods and references). Make sense?

And, yeah, this can make things a bit awkward sometimes. I know at points the marketing/publicity campaigns were pushing Thresholdas a pure, straightforward series (Book One, Book Two, etc), even though I’ve said many times that it isn’t, and I know a few readers went into some books with very different expectations. I apologize if that was you.

As it happens, I wrote a whole book explaining this called Dead Moon.  Also check out #3 up above.

Well, first off, I did two. Arguably four, since they offered to release some previously-published, out-of-print stuff nobody was interested in anymore—The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe and a bunch of short stories we combined into Dead Men Can’t Complain, but really those aren’t even exclusives.

Second, there’s a very solid argument to be made that the majority of my fanbase is audiobook listeners. Audible knows this, too, and so when they heard about Dead Moon and Terminus they made me an extremely generous offer for exclusive rights, meaning both of them would be audiobook only for the first six months they were out and then I’d be free to do what I want with them.

Yes, I know it made some of you grind your teeth. I’m sorry if you’re not an audiobook listener (for whatever reason) and it left you out of the loop for a bit. My agent and I talked a lot about the pros and cons of doing things this way. In the end, I really wanted to tell these stories and this was the best way to do it. Again, I’m sorry if it put you in a bad spot.

6) Do you make more money if I buy one of your books in a certain format?

I know this sounds like an easy question, but there’s about a dozen conditionals to any answer I give.  Figure a huge chunk of each contract is just all the different terms and conditions for when and if and how people get paid.

For example… format matters, sure, but so does whereyou bought the book.  And when.  And how many people bought it before you. And if it was on sale. And who was actually holding the sale.  And all of this changes in every contract.  What’s true for, say, Paradox Bound may not be true for Terminus.

TL;DR—just buy the format you like.

Hahhahahaaaaa remember when this was a serious question?

Okay, in all fairness, I’m doing a lot of virtual-con stuff. I was “at” WonderConand as I write this I’m about to do some things with Denver Pop Culture Con, plus I’m doing one or two things for SDCC in a couple of weeks. Also worth noting that I’ve tried to take the Writers Coffeehouse virtual, so for the next few months you can try to find me there.

After that, well… hopefully next year will be a bit closer to what we think of as normal? Maybe? If you want to see me at your local con, let them know. Email them, tweet them, post on their Instagram account. Reach out and let your voice be heard.

So, when people ask this, there’s a basic misunderstanding of how Hollywood works.  I have pretty much zero influence on Netflix making a Threshold series or the Hallmark Channel doing a Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe movie. When we see a film adaptation or TV series, it means the studio went to the writer, not the other way around. I mean, if it was just about writers saying “hey, make this into a movie,” wouldn’t most books be adapted by now? Everybody’d be doing it.  

9) Well, is there anything we can do to help?
Buying books is the best step. Talking about them is a close second. Hollywood likes to see big sales numbers and interest.  Producers/ directors/ actors all hear about this stuff the same way you do—online reviews, bestseller lists, social media. If #ParadoxBound or #Terminusstart trending on Twitter tomorrow, there’ll probably be a film deal within a week. Seriously. Try it.

One easy thing to help with this?  Don’t buy books from Amazon if you don’t absolutely have to. Write reviews there, sure, but Amazon sales figures don’t always get included in  bestsellers lists. Yeah, buying or pre-ordering from your local bookstore might cost a buck or two more, but it’s a purchase Hollywood’s much more likely to notice in the long run. Plus, now you’re one of those cool people supporting local businesses—and we need more people like that right now.

I’m thrilled and amazed people talk about anything I wrote. Seriously. What I can’t stand are people who blurt out spoilers that can ruin the impact of these stories for other people. It’s why I avoid those questions in interviews, ignore them on Twitter, and why—where I can—I delete (or block) posts that reveal things from a book.

And not just my stories! You shouldn’t mess up other stories, either. Movies, TV—I’m just saying, if you enjoyed it spoiler-free, why not try to give other people a chance to enjoy it the same way? I still haven’t watched the finales of She-Ra or Game of Thrones, dammit! I’m looking forward to finally seeing Arya on the Iron Throne!

Yeah, Ex-Tension is staying on that back burner for the moment.  Sorry.

The truth is, every series has a limited life. Book one always sells best, not as many people show up for book two, even less show up for book three, and so on. Not a lot of folks leap in on book five, y’know? Something could always happen to give the first book a boost (and all the other books after it) but they’re still all going to be on a near-constant downward slope heading for that big red line where things aren’t profitable. None of the Ex-Heroes books ever lost money (thank you all for that), but they were on that slope and when the publisher looked ahead to book six… well, hitting said line was pretty much unavoidable.

Yeah, the answer’s still no, sorry. I love these books. I had tons of fun writing them. I’m still amazed there are so many fans who feel so passionately about them. But the math is pretty simple—if enough people were willing to pay for another book, the publisher would be willing to put out another book. And all the numbers say that’s just not the case.

Yeah, I know some of you might be willing to pay twice as much (or more) to see one more book, but I think we can all agree there’s at least as many people (probably more) who wouldn’t pay anything. And that’s the math again—it just doesn’t work out for this.

Another point to consider. I’ve already got a good idea what I’m working on… probably for the next two years at this point (that big idea I mentioned up top). Maybe even a little farther. But if I do a crowdfunded project, it means I have to schedule things under the assumption it’s going to succeed. Which means telling my publishers those other projects need to be put off and scheduled accordingly. Which leaves a six or seven month hole in my schedule when the Kickstarter flops. Which, again, all the math says is what’ll happen.

So again, no. Sorry.

Short answer… no. 

Long answer… look, if I say yes to some folks, in the spirit of fairness I have to say yes to everyone. Now I’m spending most of my time reading and doing critiques instead of writing.  I don’t mean to sound mercenary, but… writing is how I pay my mortgage. So when someone asks me to read stuff, they’re asking me to give up a few hours of work. Plus, I do have this ranty writing blog sitting right, y’know, here with over a decade of advice and tips.

Also… some folks are lawsuit-crazy, and the bad ones ruin it for everyone else. Somebody shows me a piece of bland, generic fanfic and a few years from now they sue me for stealing their ideas. Yeah, I know how stupid that sounds, but I’ve actually been subpoenaed and deposed for lawsuits with less behind them than that. It’s why I’m verrrry leery when I get a long message along the lines of “You know what you should really do next with the people from 14…”  Heck, some writers respond with cease & desist orders when they get sent stuff like this.  

So the long answer also boils down to “no.” And if you send stuff without asking, I’ll delete it unread, just like spam mail.

Ahhhhh, Facebook. Where we’re the consumer and the product. Just like Soylent Green.

Sad fact is, Facebook made it pretty much pointless for me to have a fan page there.  They altered their algorithms over the years and my posts gradually went from 70-85% engagement to barely scraping 10-15% most of the time. All so I’d pay to reach people who were already following me. And I won’t do for a few reasons, the main one being folks pretty solidly proved years ago that paying for views on Facebook actually decreases your reach. Seriously.

And, sure–it’s their site. They can run it however they like. And yeah they absolutely deserve to make money off it. I’m a progressive, but I still believe in (regulated) capitalism.

But then there’s all of Facebook’s side ventures. Collecting countless amounts of personal data. Deliberately spreading misinformation. Malicious social engineering. If you think I’m exaggerating, look up articles about how Facebook shaped perceptions or spread propaganda in Myanmaror Sri Lanka. And these aren’t fringe articles—they’re from major news sites.

So, yeah,  I deleted my Facebook account months ago (long overdue), which means the fan page there is cut loose with no administrator.

I’m @PeterClines on both.  Fair warning–as some of you may have figured out, I’m progressive and I’m a bit more political on Twitter. Most Saturdays I also drink and live-tweet bad B-movies while building little toy soldiers so…  look, don’t say you didn’t know what you were getting into.

Instagram is probably the geekier of  my social medias.  How is that possible, you ask?  Well, there’s more little toy soldiers, LEGO, classic toys.  And cats.  Can’t have an Instagram account without cats. Sometimes these things mix.

Yeah, I know Instagram’s also owned by Facebook, but (for the moment) they’re not being quite so reprehensible over there.  So (also for the moment) I’ll still be there.

And I think that should answer about 90% of your questions, yes…?

I’ve been talking about genre writing for a few weeks now, I know, but I actually had one last thing that’s been tickling my brain.

There’s also another show we’ve been watching, and I’ll politely not name this one. It’s another older show (a few years now), and it’s got a strong mystery element. Well, it tries to have one, anyway.

(to be polite, some of the following plot points may be altered from of the actual show we’re watching… or are they?)

The main subplot is that our hero’s trying to learn why his father left decades ago, and has tracked down the small farming town where Dad ended up living. And dying—with a lot of things left unanswered. Things like why did Dad abandon his family? Why come to this small town? What’s with all the old books in the study? Or the ring of corn around the house? And the strange old guy who takes care of the corn who has the same name as our hero? And is this mysterious woman, Lacey, his half-sister or… something else?

Pretty much ever other week, said hero finds out some tantalizing new clue about his long-lost father and then does… nothing.

Again and again, the show has moments where we learn that Bud, the town mechanic, played chess with Dad every week… and they talked a lot. Helen, the retired nurse who hangs out in the park? It turns out she was there for Lacey’s birth… and it wasn’t exactly a normal birth. And Sheriff Mawkin? well, she was only a deputy when Dad moved to this town, but he took her aside then and told her that some day his son might come looking for him.

And our hero would be amazed and thrilled and confused about what he’d just learned… until the end of the scene. At which point, he’d completely forget about these little tidbits and act like nothing had happened. Until they came up again two or three episodes later.

We end up getting annoyed with things like this because in theory our characters are supposed to mirror our readers (or audiences, if you will). If the point is to make my readers think “Wait, what the hell does that mean…?” then this is something my characters should be thinking—and maybe even voicing—too. And they should be acting on that reaction. I can’t have a character say “this changes everything!” and then go on acting as if nothing has changed. They can’t find out Bud has the answer to the question that’s haunted them for years and then not get around to asking Bud about it. It’s frustrating because we know we wouldn’t leave it like this. We’d want more. We’d demand more!

One of the easiest things we can do at any point in our writing is to just ask ourselves “What would I be doing right now?” How would we react? What would we say? What would we be important to us right now in this situation? And if we’d demand more in this situation, well, maybe I should really think about why my characters aren’t.

I think this is also one of the reasons using mysterious characters flops so often. Because Mister X offers some vague statement or response and the main characters just… accept it. They don’t have follow-ups. They don’t demand more. They don’t take what they’ve learned and run with it. They just shrug their shoulders and say “Huh.”

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying we need to answer every question the moment it’s asked. They can get teased out and end up being false answers, misunderstandings, or red herrings. That’s part of a good mystery. A necessary part, some might argue.  So it’s okay not to answer questions right away.

But y’see, Timmy, it’s not okay to never ask those the questions. If my characters don’t care enough to ask, they can’t really care about the answers. Which means my readers probably shouldn’t care.

Which means all this mystery stuff is just a waste of time because nobody cares about it.

Next time…

Okay, I’m juggling a couple things right now. I know I haven’t updated the FAQ in a while. I’m also trying to set up theWriters Coffeehouse as an online thing. And, hahahahaaa yeah I’m trying to finish a book right now.

I guess what I’m asking is, what would you like to see in the next few weeks? Any particular topics you’d like me to blather on about? Something you want to hear a fresh take on, or a problem that’s been gnawing at you? Let me know down below.

And if nobody says anything… I may take a week off and try to get a bit caught up on things.

But for now… go write.

There was also one other genre problem I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t want that post to get ridiculously long. And in an odd way, this is sort of a reverse-genre problem. Less a problem with writing genre, more one with identifying it.

I’d like to talk to you about a little indie filmfrom a few years back called Pulp Fiction. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Excellent.

What’s that? How does this relate to genre rant, you ask? I mean, Pulp Fiction clearly isn’t a genre movie. Not in that sci-fi/fantasy sense, anyway.

Except… well, do you remember the mysterious briefcase that floats through the story? The one with something bright and glowing inside of it, something we never see. There are a lot of theories out there about what’s in the briefcase, but one of the more interesting ones is that it’s Marsellus Wallace’s soul. He made a deal with the devil as a young man and now he’s made a new deal to get it back. Jules and Vincent, you see, are the go-betweens who are getting the soul from Satan’s reps (Brett and his two partners). This is why the briefcase’s combination is 666 and why everyone is stunned by the beauty of the thing in the case—it’s a pure, innocent soul. It also explain why the bad guys can’t hit Vince and Jules—it really is divine protection.

And if the movie’s got this spiritual/magic element to it now—souls and the devil and actual divine protection—well… isn’t this a gritty urban fantasy movie? I mean, that’s pretty close to the definition of urban fantasy. Maybe supernatural crime or supernatural noir, if we want to give a more flavorful description.

Of course the real question is this. If it isWallace’s soul in the briefcase… what changes in the movie? What would be different?

Before you answer, let me point out the thing in the briefcase is what we’d call a MacGuffin. It’s an object that drives the plot without really having anything to do with it. The Maltese Falcon’s another famous one. It’s the motivation behind everything that happens in the movie—every death and betrayal and double cross—but the titular statue only shows up in the last ten minutes.

So the answer to the above question about “what would be different” is, of course, nothing. Again, the thing in the briefcase is just a MacGuffin. It could contain a human soul, a gold brick, a Tron ID disc, absolutely anything… and it wouldn’t change the plot in the slightest. Because it isn’t actually interacting with anything in a meaningful way. We can make an argument the briefcase is, but whatever’s inside it is… irrelevant.

So it’d be kinda dumb to call Pulp Fiction an urban fantasy movie. The sole element that would put it in that genre is almost completely disconnected from the plot and/or story. It may contain that element–that plot device, if you will—but that doesn’t necessarily push the movie into a different genre.

Which is the problem I wanted to talk about. Some folks have a bad habit of using a single element of a book or movie to justify bumping it into a new genre. I’ve talked about this a couple times with superpowers stories that try to call themselves superhero stories, and the problems that can cause. Just because someone’s using a sword doesn’t make my story high fantasy or historical fiction. Setting it ten years in the future doesn’t automatically mean it’s sci-fi. And just because there might be a soul in that briefcase doesn’t make Pulp Fiction urban fantasy.

I’ve seen this sooooo many times. You probably have as well. A book or show that’s really X but got marketed as Y by the author or publisher. Something that has one simple conceit to it that could be a genre element, but really the story fits into another genre altogether.

As I’ve mentioned before with superhero stories vs. superpowers stories, the big problem here becomes audience expectations. If everybody had gone into Pulp Fiction being told it was a supernatural crime story, it would’ve affected how they viewed everything they were shown. And let’s be honest… they would’ve been annoyed. Probably pissed. Because the story went against everything they thought they were going get.

What’s my point? I need to be honest with genre labels. I need to be aware of what my story really is, even if it’s got a MacGuffin or setting that might make it look like something else. Again, having a sword doesn’t suddenly make this historical fiction.

And yeah, it’s really tempting when comedies are sellingto say “Why, yes, my manuscript Terminus contains several laughs and completely reads as a comedy.” But this almost always works against me. Sure, sometimes a reader will say “this isn’t what I expected at all but I ended up loving it anyway…” but those times are few and far between.

So be honest with yourself about what you’ve written. Even if it has ghosts or clones. Or a disembodied soul in a briefcase.

Next time, speaking of genre (some more) I’ve got a little mystery for you to ponder…

Until then, go write.