When you set out to write your first book, there are a lot of challenging steps ahead. You have to plan, you have to develop, and you have to draft the thing, and of course you have to eventually get feedback on your nonfiction manuscript.
But often, I find that the most challenging aspects of writing and publishing your first book are actually the mindset issues. And that can create a lot of issues when it comes to feedback.
So many of us have had the experience of turning in a paper we thought was so good, only to get it back from a teacher who had marked it all up in red pen. That experience sticks with you.
It is one reason authors can finish a really strong book manuscript, then freeze at the exact point when they need to show it to someone else.
Getting feedback on a nonfiction manuscript does not have to be demoralizing. But you do need to be strategic about who you ask, what you ask for, and how that feedback is delivered.
Here are three ways to get stronger, more helpful feedback on your manuscript.
What Does Effective Manuscript Feedback Look Like?
Before we get into the three tips, we need to define what we mean by effective feedback.
When authors seek their first round of feedback, often from people in their personal circle, they tend to get one of two responses.
The first is: “My gosh, it was so good. You did such a good job.”
That feels good, but it is not always especially useful.
The second is a document covered in line edits. The person has marked grammar, changed sentences, and added comments throughout the manuscript.
That person may have put a lot of time and energy into helping you. But if this is your first time getting feedback on the manuscript, line edits are almost certainly not what you need yet.
Now you have feedback that is not especially helpful for you, was probably a waste of the reader’s time, and may have made you a little less confident.
No, friends.
Feedback at this stage needs to balance several things. It should:
- Show you what is working so you can lean into those strengths.
- Point out where you need to dig deeper or expand.
- Help you see both the strengths and weaknesses in the manuscript.
- Give you a useful path forward.
Both your strengths and your weaknesses are worth acknowledging.
When you work with someone who knows how to give solid feedback—or who has at least received clear direction from you—you can get real suggestions without feeling like someone is just blowing smoke.
You can also receive honest criticism that recognizes the hard work you have already done.
We want both.
But if you are not strategic about how you seek feedback, you may end up with neither. You may not get the encouragement that helps you recognize your strengths, and you may not get the practical comments that help you improve.
That can be frustrating. It can be demoralizing. When the feedback is coming from someone you know and love, it can even be damaging to the relationship.
The solution is to think carefully about what you need—and communicate it before you hand over your manuscript.
1. Choose the Right Level of Feedback
The first step is to consider what level of feedback you need at this moment.
There are three general tiers to choose from:
- Friends and family
- Beta readers
- Professional editors
Each tier can give you something different. The important thing is to match the source of feedback with the stage your manuscript is in.
Friends and family
The first tier is asking friends and family members for feedback.
When we choose this group, we are often leaning more heavily toward needing a confidence boost than we are toward getting deep, challenging editorial feedback.
Friends and family are not usually equipped to push you to stretch the manuscript and make it the best it can be. What they can often tell you is what they liked, what resonated with them, and what made sense.
That can be valuable. You just need to ask yourself when that type of feedback best aligns with what you need.
Friends-and-family feedback is easy to access, inexpensive, and usually free. That makes it tempting to ask for it immediately after finishing the manuscript.
But most of the time, you get one really solid read from your friends and family members before their eyes start glazing over.
People who are not professional editors usually cannot read a manuscript multiple times and continue to notice substantive changes. Professionals sometimes struggle with that too, so we are not trying to be too hard on Aunt Ethel.
But this means the ideal time to ask friends and family members for feedback is often not immediately after you finish your draft.
It is usually better to wait until you have already done some improvement work and the manuscript is fairly close to what you will eventually publish.
At that point, their encouragement can be especially valuable.
When the book is almost ready to enter the world, you are probably going to feel vulnerable. You are about to put your baby out into the big, bad world.
Supportive early readers can remind you what is working. They can get excited about the book. They may even begin talking about it to other people.
That excitement can help both you and the book as you prepare for publication.
For this reason, I typically recommend saving friends-and-family feedback for later in the process.
But what if my relative is a good writer?
Sometimes authors tell me their situation is a little different.
“My aunt was an English teacher.”
“My grandfather worked as a journalist.”
“My friend is a really good writer.”
Those are important skills, but knowing how to write—or knowing how to correct grammar—is not the same as knowing how to give effective feedback on a full-length nonfiction manuscript.
That is its own skill.
When you ask friends and family members to read your manuscript, it almost always makes sense to lean into the fact that they love you.
That is what they can provide that no professional can.
They can see who you are, what you are trying to do, and why the book matters to you. Sometimes they can see those things in ways that you cannot.
So let’s lean into that rather than asking them to perform a type of editorial work they may not be trained to do.
Save Aunt Ethel’s review until later. She will probably give you some grammar tips anyway, but she can also love on you in the way you need.
Beta readers
The second tier is beta readers.
I hear this term floating around quite a bit, but authors are not always clear about what it means.
Beta readers occupy a funny category. You will often pay them, and they are typically freelancers who are used to reading books and giving holistic feedback.
In that sense, they are professionals. They have done this before.
That is helpful because beta readers are less likely to make the two common mistakes friends and family make: telling you everything was wonderful or marking the entire manuscript in red pen.
But beta readers are not professional editors.
Their job is to tell you how they experienced the manuscript as a reader.
That distinction matters.
A beta reader is thinking about what it felt like to read your book. An editor is also thinking about you, the author, and the book you are trying to create.
A beta reader may tell you what was interesting, boring, funny, confusing, or moving. But beta readers will not usually give you as much push around questions like:
- What could you do more fully?
- Where could you go deeper?
- Which ideas have more promise than you have pulled out of them?
- What specific changes would strengthen the whole book?
Beta readers are not generally hired or paid to comb through the manuscript and develop that kind of editorial strategy. They are hired for a specific purpose: to act as readers who come in just before the “real” readers.
Your beta readers need to match your audience
Because beta readers are giving you a reader’s feedback rather than an editor’s feedback, they need to be the right readers.
Imagine that you have written a business book intended to disrupt your industry. You are showing people a new way to run their companies, solve a problem, or think about their work.
Now imagine sending that manuscript to someone who reads only romantasy for enjoyment.
They are probably not going to give you the feedback you need because they are not your reader.
Your beta readers should match the audience for your book.
Ideally, they should have experience beta reading the type of book you have written. More importantly, they should actually read that type of book for their own enjoyment.
Their interests, daily lives, families, communities, and experiences all affect what they will enjoy, understand, want more of, or want less of.
If you have the wrong beta readers, you will not get the right reader feedback.
Buyer beware.
I never want to discourage someone from using a resource they believe will help. But in my experience, beta readers are usually not as helpful for nonfiction as authors expect them to be.
My honest advice is often to skip them.
If you have already hired beta readers or know that you want to use them, do not let me stop you. They can provide useful information. I just do not always find that information worth the extra hiring, investment, coordination, and time.
For nonfiction, revision is often less about changing the plot or characters and more about pulling out your ideas, developing them more fully, and making the entire book clearer.
Beta readers can be very useful for fiction, where there may be more flexibility to adjust the plot, characters, tone, or mood. For nonfiction, they are not always the best next step.
Professional editorial feedback
The third tier is professional editorial feedback.
I believe deeply in this kind of support, particularly when it comes from someone who is well trained in evaluating full manuscripts.
Full disclosure: I am an editor, and I give editorial feedback professionally.
But the reason I believe in professional editorial feedback is that, when it is done well, it can give you all of the above.
A professional editor can give you the confidence boost you might receive from friends and family:
“Look at what you are doing well.”
“I see these strengths throughout the manuscript.”
“Look at everything you have already accomplished.”
A professional editor can also give you the beta-reader perspective. They can tell you what it was like to read the book—which parts were exciting, which parts made them laugh, which parts made them cry, and which parts disrupted the reading experience.
They can identify major line-level patterns, such as issues with the voice or repeated problems in the writing.
Most importantly, a professional editor can help you understand your weaknesses and how to fix them.
At Page & Podium Press, we provide this type of feedback through a service called a manuscript review. It is not a particularly creative or clever name. It is what it is.
During a manuscript review, we start by looking at the book’s market position.
Where does this book fit within the publishing industry? Does that audience match the audience the author had in mind?
We also identify the pitch we see in the manuscript.
How did we understand the meaning of the book? What did we believe the author was trying to communicate?
Seeing whether our understanding aligns with the author’s intentions can tell us a great deal about how the book is reading.
But the most important parts of the manuscript review are the analysis and recommendations.
In the analysis, we dig into the strengths of the book and the areas that need more development.
Although strengths and weaknesses may sound oppositional, they are usually connected.
We can often look at a strength an author already has and match it with a weakness elsewhere in the manuscript.
If you have this skill over here and this weakness over there, how can we bring the two together?
Now you are not only improving a weak spot. You are improving it in a way that showcases what you already do well.
That is exactly what we want.
Then, in the recommendations, we get practical.
We identify the weaknesses that most disrupted the reading experience and the places where revisions will give you the most bang for your buck.
We are not making hundreds of tiny, unrelated edits. We are thinking holistically about the book’s strengths and weaknesses and how we can use the things that make you you to pull everything into focus.
After those major issues have been addressed, any later beta readers can focus on the reading experience rather than getting distracted by structural problems.
By the time you share the book with friends and family, you can have the joy of that experience. You know you have already addressed the major structural and overarching issues. Now you can hear what it was like for people you love to read the book you created.
2. Ask Specifically for the Feedback You Need
The second tip is to be very specific about what you need.
This applies to full manuscripts, but it also applies to outlines, chapters, articles, and almost anything else you ask another person to review.
Often, our impulse is to send the work off and look the other way.
It feels painful to get the manuscript off our desk and know that it is now sitting in front of someone else.
We hope we do not look silly. We hope we have not embarrassed ourselves.
“Just get away from me. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
But y’all, this is not the way.
When we push a manuscript away without setting clear expectations for the person reading it, we risk creating a serious misalignment.
The problem may not be a difference in taste or even a difference in how the person evaluates the book. The problem may be that you and the reader had completely different expectations for the exchange.
This matters especially when you are asking friends or family members for feedback and want to preserve those relationships.
It can become even more complicated with memoir, when the people reading the book may also appear in it.
The solution is to be very clear about what you need.
Ask questions your reader can answer
You can give your reader a few specific questions, but make sure they are questions that person is actually equipped to answer.
You may want information about the structure, for example. But if the reader is not a trained editor, do not just ask, “What did you think about the structure?”
Ask questions like:
- Did the story hang together?
- Were there parts of the book that dragged?
- Did anything feel out of order?
- Did the book move quickly when it needed to?
- Did it slow down when it needed to?
For general nonfiction, you might ask:
- Were there concepts that were not clear?
- Were there examples that jumped out at you?
- Did you understand why this issue is urgent?
- Did you understand the mistakes people commonly make?
- Did the framework make sense?
What we are trying to do is narrow the request down to information that will actually be helpful to you, using language your reader can answer.
You can also ask about the tone, voice, or emotional energy.
For memoir, you might ask:
- Were you able to feel along with me?
- Did the sad parts affect you?
- Did the funny parts make you laugh?
- Did the emotional tone feel right for what was happening?
For other types of nonfiction, you might ask whether the tone, voice, and overall feeling of the book matched the topic.
You can also ask about content:
- Were the stories effective?
- Were you surprised to see anything left out?
- Were there places where you wanted more information?
- Were there places where I gave you too much?
- Did anything feel boring or overwhelming?
You know your book. You probably know which parts you are uncertain about.
This is the moment to ask yourself: What do I actually want from this person?
Be very clear.
I usually suggest limiting your questions to three to five. People may be excited to give you their time and energy, but you probably need only a narrow set of information from each reader.
When you make a specific request, people are often happy to give you exactly what you need.
3. Consider a Different Feedback Format
The third tip is to consider alternatives in how the feedback is shared.
The default approach is to send someone the manuscript and receive it back marked up, either by hand or through tracked changes and comments.
At Page & Podium Press, we are not fans of this approach for early, big-picture feedback.
Later in the publishing process, a copy editor will need to give you a marked-up document. You need to be able to see what is happening at the line level.
But that is not what we are talking about here.
At this stage, you need 10,000-foot-view feedback. That is true whether the feedback comes from friends and family, beta readers, or a professional editorial assessment.
Why a full developmental edit can be overwhelming
I have seen first-time authors seek a full developmental edit immediately after finishing their manuscript.
Developmental editing can be a great service. We offer it too.
But I do not usually push first-time authors toward it because it can create an enormous amount of information overload.
A traditional developmental edit may include comment bubbles throughout the entire manuscript, tracked changes, and detailed suggestions within the pages. It may also include a long editorial letter.
I have seen those letters run seven, nine, or even fifteen single-spaced pages.
That is a lot of information about everything that supposedly needs to change.
I have frankly seen this blow up in first-time authors’ faces.
If you have never written a book before, you probably already have a non-small amount of fear about showing it to another person.
Then the developmental edit comes back covered in comments, along with a huge letter.
How do you feel?
You feel like you do not know how to do any of it. You feel overwhelmed. You wonder what the payoff could possibly be.
This is where we need to think outside the box.
Marking up a manuscript can be helpful later. Once the structural revisions are complete, the content is in place, and the voice and tone are working, by all means, get that copy edit. Get that line edit. Get somebody in there with a red pen.
But most authors are not ready for that when they first finish their first manuscript.
Most authors need to understand the 10,000-foot view.
Why am I changing this scene?
Why am I adding this context?
Why am I deleting this entire section?
With a manuscript full of individual edits, it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. You have hundreds of specific suggestions without a clear sense of how they fit together.
Sometimes, we need to stop marking up the manuscript.
When feedback clearly explains the strengths and weaknesses, how they work together, and how to apply existing strengths to the weaker parts of the manuscript, the revision process becomes much less overwhelming.
Is revision easy? No. Never.
But at least you are not looking at the feedback itself and feeling buried.
Ask for an overall written response
One alternative is to ask the person giving feedback to write a description of the overarching issues rather than commenting within the manuscript.
This can help a friend or family member resist the temptation to mark individual sentences.
Ask them to give you a few paragraphs about their reading experience. They can answer your specific questions and explain what they noticed without filling your pages with corrections.
Talk about the manuscript instead
Another alternative may be even stronger: Instead of relying only on written feedback, schedule a conversation.
When you are working with friends and family, this may be best done in person. Sit down and talk.
A conversation allows you to ask questions and clarify what the person means.
It also allows the reader to be honest while seeing your response in real time.
We all have friends and family members who can be a little critical. They do not necessarily mean to be. Often, it comes from love.
But if the conversation becomes too biting or cutting, they can see your reaction. You can also slow things down and say, “Can we back up a little? I’m not sure I understand the whole perspective here.”
You can navigate the relationship in real time.
I know this may sound much scarier than receiving written comments. But having that point of human connection can be incredibly helpful.
You can recognize what each person was trying to do: you with the manuscript and them with their feedback.
This conversation is also part of the Page & Podium manuscript review process. Every manuscript review includes an hour-long coaching session at the end.
The session is designed partly for questions and discussion. We talk about what we are seeing, where the strengths are, and where the weaknesses are.
But it is also there because I want to make sure the author has a plan.
I do not want to give anyone feedback they do not know how to implement.
A conversation gives us a chance to say: That was the editor’s experience of reading the manuscript. Now what does the author want to do with that feedback?
With a professional, you can also be guided through this process rather than having to guide someone else through it.
Get Feedback You Can Actually Use
None of us wants to ask people for feedback that we cannot implement, do not understand, or that simply makes us angry.
We definitely do not want manuscript feedback to damage an important relationship.
To get helpful feedback on a nonfiction manuscript:
- Match the level of feedback to the stage of the manuscript. Think strategically about whether you need support from friends and family, a reader’s response, or professional editorial guidance.
- Ask specifically for what you need. Give readers a short list of concrete, answerable questions instead of simply asking what they thought.
- Consider a different format. You may get clearer, less overwhelming feedback from an overall written response or a live conversation than from a manuscript filled with individual comments.
When you finish your manuscript, give it a read-through and make all the revisions you can see on your own.
Then seek feedback that helps you understand not only where the book is weak, but also how to use its existing strengths to make the entire manuscript stronger.
That is the kind of feedback that gives you a real way forward.
Ready for Professional Feedback on Your Manuscript?
Page & Podium Press offers manuscript reviews for completed nonfiction and memoir manuscripts.
Rather than marking up every page, we provide a written report that identifies your manuscript’s strengths, its most important opportunities for improvement, and practical recommendations for moving forward. You will also receive a coaching session so that you can ask questions and leave with a clear revision plan.
Learn more about the manuscript review service at pageandpodium.com/manuscript.
