How to Get a Book Beta-Reader Ready in 3 Weeks

a short daily series- running till July 15th

Madi Taskett here *waves*.

I promised beta readers I’d get them the rough draft of my book in about a month… about a month ago.

My rough draft is in BAD shape. I’m going fix it by July 15th at the latest, and I’m taking you with me on a short, daily series that will end when I get the book to my beta readers.

You with me? Let’s go.

Day 1.

I get asked all the time how I finish a rough draft without shriveling up in a ball and dying, so I’ll cover that today. Tomorrow, I’ll share how I’m going to tackle this ‘Beta Reader Ready in 3 Weeks’ thing in a measurable, repeatable way.

So, how does one actually finish a rough draft. For me, 31 day sprints are my superpower. A month is enough time to make an impact but also short enough to keep me super focused.

My recent sprint goal was to write an entire draft in a month. Note: it took me a year of writing to build up to this pace, and I’m able to devote all my time to this. Someone else’s goal might be anything from a full draft, to simply writing 50 words a day. I wish I had a better example than Neil Gaiman, but the asshole did write Coraline by writing just 50 words a night in bed before falling asleep.

To get a daily goal, I take the word count of my overall goal and divide it by 31 days. A book in my genre is 80,000 words. Divide that by 31, and I need to write 2581 words/day to hit my goal. If I want to take weekends off, that’s 23 writing days, which means 3,479 words/day.

Then, I either open Google Sheets or Notion and start tracking my daily word count. Here’s my most recent Notion sprint. (and a screenshot of it below)

Every night, I update the daily word count, and at the bottom I have a tally of the total words written. I get super motivated by this, and I wrote my full rough draft in just 25 days (but I realize that’s insane, so, don’t feel pressured by my progress).

Editing requires different progress than drafting. I’ve tried going about editing the same way I draft, and I’ve tried measuring it similarly, and both have led me in hopeless little circles until I’m dizzy and I want to throw up and cry at the same time. Through tears, I look at my spinning draft, the words an ugly blur, and wonder why the hell I ever thought I could be an author in the first place.

I’ve never made it past this point.

But that ends now. I’ll see you tomorrow to talk about how this is gonna work.

Until mañana,
Madi

PS- If you remember the Sci-Fi book I was writing, I shelved it for now. After 4 drafts, the story structure simply wasn’t working. I’ve heard it takes 5 crappy books to write a good one, so we’re on to crappy book #2 (lol), which I’ll tell you more about soon.