Writing a book can be a long and lonely process. You’ve spent months drafting and you’ve done some revisions on your own—but were your revisions successful? Does your book communicate to your readers the way you want it to?  Getting effective feedback on your writing can be crucial to having the strongest book you can before you start looking to query or publish. Effective feedback gives you an idea of how your book is likely to be understood and received by your audience. It can reveal to you what is not working the way you envisioned and can even help you generate ideas on how to solve those problems.

Frequently in writing you may get stuck in the revision process. You’ve looked at your book as a whole, and you see that there are things that are not quite working—but how do you fix them? That feedback from a smart reader can really get you back on track.

While it is a truism that having a second pair of eyes on your work can be a huge benefit, there is such a thing as bad feedback, the wrong time to get feedback, and the wrong people to get feedback from. Bad feedback can derail your progress, stall you for weeks, of even kill a book that has real potential. Worse still, bad feedback can wound your heart. Your book is precious to you, so it’s important to think carefully about who you let evaluate it while it’s still in a delicate, developmental state.

In the video below, Amanda discusses how to be intentional with asking for feedback so it will the most helpful and avoid hurting your confidence. Continue below the video if you prefer to read your writing advice.

If you’re to the revision and feedback stage yet, but still just trying understand how long this process will really take, start to finish, you’re not alone! Not knowing how long it will take can be a stumbling block that can impede your steady progress and open you up to self-doubt and unrealistic expectations. Writing your first book is full of unknowns. Who needs one more??

That’s why we created the Writing Plan Calculator. This simple, interactive guide will walk you through the decisions you need to make to figure out how long the drafting process is going to take. Once you’ve made those decisions, just plug them in, and you’ll learn how long your memoir will take, PLUS how much you need to accomplish each and every week to stay on track.

Click here to get a realistic timeline and create your full memoir writing plan now!

When you think about your first experience getting feedback on your writing, it was probably from a teacher. Now, the teacher might not have been concerned with what you wanted to share from your heart. What you intended to communicate is subjective, but teachers often focus on the objective in their grading—and some teachers love some red ink. It can be hard to see the forest for the trees when you get back a piece of writing that is bleeding. It’s hard to tell how much ink is marking grammar issues, or structure, or how well it fit the prompt, the personal preferences and priorities of the reader, and so on. It can leave you feeling defeated, and it doesn’t give you a good sense of where to start in your revisions.

The effects of bad feedback

Good feedback should leave you feeling energized and excited to make changes that’s going to make your writing so much stronger. It should also honor the place in the progress your work is. Your work might need a complete re-haul or it might need a fine comb, but you can’t do both at once.

When, Who, What & How to ask for writing feedback

When to ask for feedback?

You want to ask for feedback when you know what level of feedback you need, and you have something relatively complete. Writing is so lonely, it can be tempting to ask for a response every time you finish the first draft of every chapter. But there’s such a thing as too much feedback—getting notes on everything can pull you in too many different directions. Secondly, if you know what you need to do next, even if it’s going to be hard, then it’s too early for feedback. Be wary of asking for feedback when what you really want is validation to keep going.

Who to ask for feedback?

First, let’s review who not to ask.

• The person in your life you just loves giving feedback—about everything, anytime, regardless of whether they were asked—is not the person to hand your book to. We all know that person and it might be tempting to go that direction because after all, they’ll be most likely to say yes when asked. However, this kind of personality can’t filter what they think based on what is going to be most helpful to you, so they’ll just give it all, and you’ll end up feeling more confused than before.
• If you’re writing a memoir, any of the people featured heavily in your story. Simply be honest, could you give objective, considerate feedback on a piece of work that had a version of you as a character? I couldn’t!
• Your biggest cheerleader. This person is precious, and it’s a relationship that you should treasure. But they aren’t going to tell you that the flashback in Chapter 7 just doesn’t work. Worse, cheerleaders can lose energy over time, especially if they’re reading your work through multiple iterations. Reserve that energy for when you need motivation to get through the final stretch and a champion for your book when it’s really ready for market.

Giving feedback is a skill, but it doesn’t have to be a writerly skill

There are two main levels of readers you can seek out for giving you feedback—professionals in publishing and audience representation. We’ll talk about how to get professional advice at this stage shortly. The other category is audience representation.

Picture your book, finished, published, for sale in a book store. Who in your social circle is the type of person to browse that section of the book store? Who is most likely to be in your audience, even if they weren’t also your friend? This is who you want to reach for if you’re asking for feedback as a favor. Readers of your genre will have developed some sense of what works in the books they read and what doesn’t, even if they haven’t fully realized it. They will also have the same expectations of your work that your actual audience will have, so they can help you see your book clearly from your audience’s perspective.

A note on beta readers

For the past decade or so, there has been growing talk in online writers’ circles about beta readers and the need for them. While seeking out a beta readers might be helpful, we want to note that these readers are more in the audience representation category than professionals in publishing. There is no magical middle group of “beta readers” that you must consult on every project.

Getting a Developmental Edit from a Professional

Editors are worth their weight in gold. Not only are they professionals, they are readers. They know what to look for in what makes a book work or not work. You might feel that you’re not ready to hire an editor because your book isn’t in the copyediting or polishing stage. It is true that you don’t want to hire an editor do help with a final edit when you’re manuscript might have structural issues or needs significant rewrites or additions. As we discussed in last week’s blog, you don’t polish a piece of furniture that is put together wrong.

However, many editors offer a tier of service known as a developmental edit. Editors know how the writing process goes, so they know many writers are not ready for the fine-comb treatment but still need guidance! Different editors provide different levels of service and advice, and these are often called manuscript reviews or developmental edits. In this process, editors will read your work and provide overall, big-picture guidance and suggestions for revisions and how to make your book’s structure really strong to go into the next stage. Professional editors know how to advise you based on what you are trying to accomplish with your book, rather than just their own personal preferences.

Whether or not you invest money at this stage of your book’s development is completely up to you—authors can be successful either way. However, we do want to you to know you can get professional advice at this stage and advice geared for this developmental step of your project.

What do you need to make progress?

Giving your reader guidance is the best way to ensure their feedback is helpful to you. Asking specific questions of your reader will also give them parameters of what they should be reading for, which will also make your reader more comfortable in the process, especially if they are your audience representation and you’re asking them as a favor. You can ask what they did or didn’t like, but often readers struggle to answer this question. What they did or didn’t like might be entirely subjective, or they might worry about discouraging you with negativity. Remember, we don’t seek feedback for validation, we seek it for data. You can always ask them for specifics tailored to your story, but we recommend these four as a starting place:

What happens in the book?

You want to be sure your intended central focus is what is coming across most strongly. Having your main points summarized back to you can really illustrate whether you’re communicating your main ideas clearly.

What is the lesson of this book?

This might seem like the same question, but it’s a distinct one, especially for memoir. It may show you might need to better balance out story and message.

What chapters seem out of place?

This will invite them to share what part of the book seemed weakest. It might not mean what it needs to be cut, but something doesn’t quite work.

Was there anything you didn’t understand or felt too vague?

This invites specifics and sets up the tone for your feedback.

How do you want that feedback?

Finally, determine before you ask how you want to receive your feedback. Do you want written notes on a physical copy? Do you want written notes as an overall letter?

Written notes can be very helpful for remembering all the details of your feedback, but they can also feel like giving your friend homework, and might not be necessary. Whether you request written notes or not, we do recommend trying to schedule a time to meet directly. Having a conversation with your reader gives you the opportunity to ask follow up questions and be sure you understand their thoughts and responses.

Finally, giving questions ahead and scheduling a time together to discuss can also guide the way your reader both reads your work and approaches their feedback. You want feedback that is helpful and constructive, but not discouraging. Being deliberate in how you set this up can give you both a much better and more positive experience.

Happy Writing!