Blessed by Beta Readers

Beta readers are so absolutely necessary. I've been blessed to find some very good ones. I always have my family read my books before they go outside the family. I know there are some people who don't have their family read their books until they are published, but I kind of take it for granted that my family will read my stuff. Without them, my books would really be a mess. They have helped me fix so many big things, or told me the book just needs an entire rewrite (The Crossways). But even my family doesn't catch everything. I chalk it up to the fact that they've been hearing me talk about the book for years, and so they know almost everything there is to know about the stories. My beta readers, however, are seeing it with fresh eyes. Which means they catch things.

One noticed that Emily referenced something she wouldn't find out about for several chapters. Oops. Two pointed out that Joey thought about how he had one nice sister when he gets along with two out of his three sisters. Still another pointed out that taking a certain sentence literally created an odd mental picture. And she compared it to saying "Her eyes floated to the ceiling." She told me that in a text which I received while I was cooking. So I'm mixing together baked beans and thinking of floating eyeballs. That was...interesting. And there was the fact that watching mostly BBC shows for the past year and several months kind of rubbed off on me, which meant some of my American characters, um, sounded British. After a beta reader pointed that out, which was something my sister had been onto me for, I found some more American alternatives.

All these things just serve to make it just that much better. And my proofreaders will help me polish it up to perfection. Well, as close to perfection as humans can make it. And then my blogger friends will help me tell everyone all about it. Speaking of which, I'm planning on sending out the tentative blog tour schedule this morning. If you don't get an email by about noon, but you thought you signed up, or you meant to sign up but forgot (I've done that, sorry), it's not too late. Just shoot me an email and/or go ahead and fill out the form (it's still on the "Creighton Hill Blog Tour" tab) and I'll still work you in. Though it is possible that this is a scheduled post actually written the last day of April, and some life thing happened to prevent my actually sending the email as planned. I hope not. That would be bad. But I'm getting excited about my first blog tour. It's going to be super awesome because I have super awesome bloggers involved, so it can't help but be so. :)

I also have a brand new Creighton Hill trailer to share with you. Enjoy!

 

And in other news, Across the Stars is now available to be borrowed through Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program. So if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free!